COUNTING DOWN THE

TOP 10 HUBBLE IMAGES

APRIL 2015

LOOKING FOR
HIS LEGACY
TODAY
 SO YOU CAN
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 APRIL 2015 • VOL. 227 • NO. 4

Images of the “Pillars

of Creation” are among
thousands the Hubble
Space Telescope has
captured. In this issue
lead Hubble imaging
scientist Zoltan Levay
picks his ten favorites.
PHOTO: NASA; ESA; HUBBLE
HERITAGE TEAM, STSCI/AURA.
COLORIZED COMPOSITE/MOSAIC

Are your favorite

Hubble photos in our
gallery of top shots?
Go to ngm.com/more.

62 Hubble’s Greatest Hits

After 25 years on the job, the Hubble Space Telescope stands as “one of the world’s
most productive and popular scientific machines.” By Timothy Ferris

30 76 96 116
Lincoln How Coal Fuels The Bug That’s Trajan’s Amazing
Along the train route that his body traveled India’s Insurgency Eating the Woods Column
home, people debate Lincoln’s legacy. Militants capitalize A warming climate On a pillar of Car-
By Adam Goodheart on human poverty is good for pine rara marble, an
Photographs by Eugene Richards amid mineral wealth. beetles—which is emperor’s exploits
By Anthony Loyd very bad for forests. tower over Rome.
A Lincoln Gallery
Photographs by By Hillary Rosner By Andrew Curry
Photos show the struggles of the nation Lynsey Addario Photographs by Photographs by
etched into the president’s face. Peter Essick Kenneth Garrett

130 Proof | Argentine Identities
A photographer glimpses many cultures in
the faces of the country’s people.
Story and Photographs by Marco Vernaschi
On the Cover Alexander Gardner photographed Abraham Lincoln
on November 8, 1863, 11 days before the president delivered the
Gettysburg Address. Photograph from Library of Congress
Corrections and Clarifications Go to ngm.com/more.

O F F I C IA L J O U R NA L O F T H E NAT I O NA L G E O G R A P H I C S O C I E T Y
 FROM THE EDITOR

Lincoln

The Longing for Lincoln

Doris Kearns Goodwin, the best-selling chronicler of America’s presidents,
knows the question historians would expect her to ask Abraham Lincoln if
she could. How would you have dealt with Reconstruction differently than
Andrew Johnson? the dutiful Goodwin would inquire. Lincoln’s death cut
short what probably would have been a gentler approach
to the South after the Civil War, she explains. If he’d lived,
“it might have helped ease the racial tension that’s lasted
for hundreds of years.”
But given the chance to actually sit down with our 16th
and, arguably, greatest president, Goodwin would ask
something very different. “I would just say to him, Tell me
a story,” she says. “The minute he started telling a story, his
eyes would light up, as if he had just come from black and
white into full color.”
April 14 marks the 150th anniversary of Lincoln’s
assassination. Like Goodwin, many of us seek that essen-
tial Lincoln. We want to understand how a boy who knew
so much privation and loss became a man of resilience,
confidence, and humility, whose spirit still helps define
the nation he loved and saved.
This is the story that writer Adam Goodheart and pho-
tographer Eugene Richards set out to tell as they retraced
the path of Lincoln’s funeral train over 1,654 miles, from
Washington, D.C., to its final stop in Springfield, Illinois.
Perhaps a million people filed past the president’s open
coffin; millions more lined the tracks. It was an outpouring
of shared grief after a war that killed as many as 850,000
American soldiers.
What was this longing for Lincoln, and why does
it endure?
On one level, says Goodwin, it’s obvious. “He won the
war, saved the Union, ended slavery. That legacy is a
permanent legacy to our nation and an advance of social
justice.” But she also thinks that Lincoln’s life story itself
touches emotions in a singularly powerful way.
This portrait of a She quotes from Ernest Hemingway’s Farewell to Arms: “The world
contemplative breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places.”
Lincoln was made
on August 9, 1863, in “This is true of Lincoln,” Goodwin says. “He had a sustaining spirit.”
a Washington, D.C.,
photo studio.

Susan Goldberg, Editor in Chief

PHOTO: ALEXANDER GARDNER; LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

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national geo graphic • April 

 History’s Greatest
Voyages of Exploration
Taught by Professor
Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius
UNIVERSITY OF TENNESSEE, KNOXVILLE
E D TIME OF
IT LECTURE TITLES

FE
LIM
70%
1. The Earliest Explorers

R
2. The Scientific Voyage of
Pytheas the Greek

off
3. St. Brendan—The Travels
of an Irish Monk

30
O
R 4. Xuanzang’s Journey to the West
DE I

L
R BY A PR 5. Leif Eriksson the Lucky
6. Marco Polo and Sir John Mandeville
7. Ibn Battuta—Never the
Same Route Twice
8. Portugal’s Great Leap Forward
9. The Enigmatic Christopher Columbus
10. Magellan and the Advent
of Globalization
11. The Ruthless Ambition of
the Conquistadors
12. Henry Hudson—Death on the Ice
13. The Jesuits on a Global Mission
14. Captain Cook Maps the World
15. Alexander von Humboldt—
Explorer Genius
16. Jefferson Dispatches Lewis and Clark
17. Sir John Franklin’s Epic Disaster
18. Ida Pfeiffer—Victorian Extreme Traveler
19. Japan Discovers the West
20. Dr. Livingstone and Mary
Kingsley in Africa
21. Arctic Feats and Fates
22. Antarctic Rivalries
23. A Deep-Sea Dive into the
Mariana Trench

Follow the Paths Forged by 24. The Race to Outer Space

the Greatest Explorers

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3 Questions
nationalgeographic.com/3Q

Why I’m a Man of

Science—and Faith
Francis S. Collins, a physician and the geneticist behind
the Human Genome Project, is the director of the National
Institutes of Health. He is also founder of the BioLogos
Foundation (biologos.org), a group that fosters discus-
sions about the intersection of Christianity and science.

Are science and religion compatible?

I am privileged to be somebody who tries to under-
stand nature using the tools of science. But it is
also clear that there are some really important
questions that science cannot really answer, such
as: Why is there something instead of nothing? Why
are we here? In those domains I have found that
faith provides a better path to answers. I find it oddly
anachronistic that in today’s culture there seems
to be a widespread presumption that scientific and
spiritual views are incompatible.

When people think of those views as

incompatible, what is lost?
Science and faith can actually be mutually enriching
and complementary once their proper domains are
understood and respected. Extreme cartoons repre-
senting antagonistic perspectives on either end of
the spectrum are often the ones that get attention,
but most people live somewhere in the middle.

You’ve said that a blooming flower is not a

miracle since we know how that happens.
As a geneticist, you’ve studied human life at
a fundamental level. Is there a miracle woven
in there somewhere?
Oh, yes. At the most fundamental level, it’s a miracle
that there’s a universe at all. It’s a miracle that it
has order, fine-tuning that allows the possibility of
complexity, and laws that follow precise mathemati-
cal formulas. Contemplating this, an open-minded
observer is almost forced to conclude that there
must be a “mind” behind all this. To me, that qualifies
as a miracle, a profound truth that lies outside of
scientific explanation.

PHOTO: REBECCA HALE, NGM STAFF

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Vomiting 7.1 14.3
Decreased Appetite 6.7 0.0
Diarrhea 4.9 2.9
Lethargy 5.4 7.1
Polydipsia 1.8 4.3
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Summit, NJ 07901

Made in Austria

Copyright © 2014 Intervet Inc, a subsidiary of Merck & Company Inc.

All rights reserved

141487 R2
©2015 NGC Network US, LLC and NGC Network International, LLC. NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC CHANNEL and the Yellow Border design are trademarks of National Geographic Society; used with permission.
EXPLORE Science

Light 1

Flights
While airlines may set the
fares and fees for air travel, 2
the decisions made by pas-
sengers also come with costs.
Every item on board makes
a plane heavier, which burns
more fuel. An airliner’s cost
of operating rises with every
laptop (70 cents per flight), 3 5
pillow (12 cents), or magazine
(11 cents) you bring along.
Want your flight to burn
less fuel? Start by emptying
your bladder before boarding.
MIT aeronautical engineers
Luke Jensen and Brian Yutko
used a set of typical U.S.
and European flight condi-
tions to analyze how specific
items add up on three major
carriers (United, American,
and Ryanair) over a normal
day. Uncertainties abound,
such as the price of fuel or the
cost of an unexpected detour.
And even if passengers help
reduce weight, airlines don’t
always share savings with 4
ticket buyers. But the surest
way to minimize the cost of
flying a plane, says Jensen, is
to limit the number of things—
like bags—that people can
bring aboard without an extra
fee. —Daniel Stone

national geo graphic • Apri l 

 WHAT IT COSTS
Your ticket accounts for you—and the items you carry. During
one year on a Boeing 737-800 operated by United, even small
things add up to big costs.
Added fuel cost for one item on one plane over one year

1 Carry-on 2 Video console 3 Magazine 4 Suitcase 5 Meal tray 6 Neck pillow

$980 $457 $46 $3,267 $65 $42
15 lbs 7.0 lbs 0.7 lbs 50 lbs 1.0 lbs 0.65 lbs

6 7 Full bladder 8 Laptop 9 Tablet 10 Cell phone 11 12-oz. drink 12 Peanut packet
7 $29 $291 $59 $25 $56 $2
0.44 lbs 4.46 lbs 0.9 lbs 0.38 lbs 0.86 lbs 0.03 lbs

WHERE PLANES GO
8
To make an aircraft cost-effective,
airlines need to constantly move 3
people or things. In one day a typical
Boeing 737 flies about 4,300 miles. U N I T E D S TAT E S 1
4
9 Fuel weight Fuel volume
11
1. EWR Newark, NJ (lbs) (gallons) 5

to 2. IAH Houston, TX..................... 19,000 2,800

10
12 to 3. PDX Portland, OR.................. 23,000 3,400
2
to 4. SFO San Francisco, CA ......... 10,000 1,400
to 5. RDU Raleigh-Durham, NC..... 29,000 4,400
12,000 Total

HOW FAR WE’VE COME

Compared to 40 years ago, today’s single-aisle jets can carry the same size load the
same distance on roughly half the fuel. Lighter hulls, more fuel-efficient engines, and
improved aerodynamics allow airlines to maximize the number of passengers.

1970
43.0 passenger miles per gallon 727-200

158,000 lbs total weight

104,775 lbs structural
23,225 lbs fuel
30,000 lbs payload

2014
76.2 passenger miles per gallon 737-800

134,500 lbs
91,325
13,175
30,000

Cost calculations were made using Boeing 737-800 aircraft carrying 75 percent of payload capacity. Passenger miles per gallon is derived
from a plane’s average miles per gallon multiplied by the typical number of passengers.

MATTHEW TWOMBLY, NGM STAFF. ART: HANS JENSSEN. SOURCES: BRIAN YUTKO AND LUKE JENSEN
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 EXPLORE

Planet Earth

Splash Down
More than one million swimming pools gleam from
California’s backyards. With the state in its fourth year of
drought, these residential oases have become a target
of local water restrictions. Yet pools can waste less water
than traditional lawns, research has shown.
“The big thing with a pool is that you fill it once,” says
Jonathan Volzke, spokesperson for the Santa Margarita
Water District in Orange County, which rolled back its
pool prohibitions after analyzing water usage. Pools are
also usually surrounded by decks, which means an area
up to three times the size of the pool no longer requires
any water at all. Add a cover to prevent evaporation, and
a pool can use even less water over time than drought-
tolerant landscaping. —Rachel Hartigan Shea

PHOTO: DAMION BERGER

This Is How To Walk the Walk
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 EXPLORE

Wild Things

A hunter felled
this giraffe in
Eastern Cape,
South Africa,
in 2012.

G
 iraffes With their striking coat patterns and towering height, giraffes are iconic African
creatures—yet they haven’t been the subject of much scientific study. Now re-
searchers who track the animals report a disturbing trend: Across the continent
at Risk populations have dwindled from 140,000 to fewer than 80,000 over the past 15
years, according to the Giraffe Conservation Foundation (GCF).
Slow-moving and enormous, “giraffes offer an easy target and lots of meat”
for poachers, particularly in the war-torn Democratic Republic of the Congo, says
GCF Executive Director Julian Fennessy. Herds also are diminished by habitat
loss and by hunters who cater to the superstition among some tribes that eating
giraffe brains wards off HIV. Still, says Fennessy, there is hope for the future. “We
wouldn’t be doing this work if we thought it was too late.” —Catherine Zuckerman

CUB PROVIDES HOPE FOR THREATENED SPECIES

In summer 2014, while tracking a rare Andean bear in Ecuador’s Cayambe
Coca National Park, scientists noticed that her activity centered on one area—
a possible sign of nesting. They later found her cub. The animals, known
also as spectacled bears for their facial markings, belong to the only wild bear
species in South America; by some estimates, fewer than 3,000 now live in
Ecuador. Ongoing observations of this cub will shape efforts to save the soli-
tary, vulnerable species and perhaps boost its numbers. —Lindsay N. Smith

PHOTOS: DAVID CHANCELLOR, INSTITUTE (TOP); ARMANDO CASTELLANOS

 TAKE A
SMART STEP
TOWARD YOUR
FINANCIAL
FUTURE

Establishing a charitable gift

annuity with National Geographic
is a great way to help protect our
planet for generations to come—
while securing safe, steady
payments, at an attractive rate,
for you right now.

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 EXPLORE
Planet Earth: By the Numbers

Climate CONSERVING HABITATS IN CALIFORNIA

and Birds Millions of birds forage in
wetlands while migrating
Climate change is threatening along the route known
some of North America’s most as the Pacific flyway.
beloved birds. According to a Wetlands, once abundant
in California, have
recent Audubon Society report, decreased, cultivated NORTH
by 2080 shifting temperatures by farmers or drained AMERICA
by the ongoing drought.
could greatly reduce the habitats
AREA
of ten U.S. state birds. ENLARGED

1billion
BELOW
Since bird populations are
indicators of ecosystem health, PA
it’s important to track their CIF
IC
FL
numbers to determine where

YW
conservation efforts are needed

AY
most. Bird-watchers are helping birds migrate along the
by uploading as many as eight Pacific flyway each year. SOUTH
AMERICA
million bird sightings every month Many breed in the high Arctic in
to eBird, an online database summer; some fly as far as the
tip of South America to winter.
with nearly 250 million records.
Mark Reynolds of the Nature
Conservancy says crowdsourc-
ing is one tool for saving fleeting
habitats. —Kelsey Nowakowski
CENTRAL VALLEY WETLANDS
Many rice farms
A century ago
are in the northern
4 million acres
Central Valley, where
DECLINING HABITATS birds need wetlands.
Cen

Pacific
tra

NUMBER OF BIRD SPECIES AT RISK OF V flyway within

l

314
LOSING HALF THEIR HABITAT BY 2080
all

California
ey

Most of the
Today lost wetlands are
250,000 now farmed.
CALIFORNIA
0 mi 200

0 km 200

Climate change could affect more than half

the 588 species in the Audubon report.

126 species BIRD POPULATION CHANGE BY HABITAT

endangered Percentage change 1968-2012
Percentage change 1968-2012
188
threatened -50% 0% 50%
Ocean, coast
Arid land
Grassland
274 Eastern forest
unaffected
Western forest
Coast (winter)
Wetland
 More than 350 bird
species use the Pacific
flyway each year.

RENTING FARMS FOR TEMPORARY HABITAT

A new Nature Conservancy program pays rice farmers in the northern Central
Valley to flood their fields during peak migration times. These “pop-up”
habitats are cheaper than setting aside and maintaining permanent refuges.

1. MINE THE DATA

Crowdsourced data on bird sight-
ings and NASA satellite images are
2.
analyzed to determine where and
when wetlands are most needed.
RENT THE FIELDS
Flooding rice fields in late winter
can be risky: They might not dry
out by planting time. Farmers are
compensated accordingly.

9,600
acres of pop-up

3. FLOOD THE FIELDS

Fields are covered with a few
inches of water for two to eight
4. SAVE THE BIRDS
The temporary wetlands hosted
more than 50 species of shore-
habitat were
flooded in 2014.

weeks. Migrating birds feed and birds, waders, and waterfowl—

rest in the pop-up habitats. 200,000 birds—in 2014.

HABITAT LOSS BY 2080

Modeling suggests that the species below will lose a significant
amount of habitat. Conservation efforts have expanded habitats
of winter-coastal and wetland species such as mallards.

Lost 55% 49% 47% 32%

92%

Greater sage-grouse Whip-poor-will Northern pygmy owl Sprague’s pipit Pacific golden plover
Arid land Eastern forest Western forest Grassland Ocean, coast

NGM MAPS. GRAPHIC: ÁLVARO VALIÑO. SOURCES: NATIONAL AUDUBON SOCIETY;

NATURE CONSERVANCY; CORNELL LAB OF ORNITHOLOGY
 EXPLORE

Ancient Worlds

A Mural’s
New Date
Surreal life-size figures on
a sandstone wall in Utah’s
Horseshoe Canyon may be
thousands of years younger
than experts estimated. Using
new techniques to gauge how
long rocks had been exposed
to sunlight, researchers sig-
nificantly narrowed the period
in which the mural must have
been painted.
Their reconstruction of
events: 2,000 years ago a
sheet of rock fell from the cliff.
Artists then used the fresh
surface as their canvas. About
900 years ago another sheet
fell, taking a few painted
figures with it.
Steven Simms, a Utah
State University archaeolo-
REPATRIATING HISTORY gist involved in the research,
After two centuries abroad, Mexico’s first sweeping, native-authored his- thinks the paintings may
tory is back home again. Last fall the National Institute of Anthropology have been made within a
and History acquired three 17th-century volumes—two written in Span- few hundred years of the
ish; the third, the Codex Chimalpahin (below left), in Nahuatl—from the first rockfall, during a time of
British and Foreign Bible Society. In 1827 a priest traded the vivid, hand- major transformation as corn
written accounts of life, society, and politics in Aztec Mexico for a stack
farmers from the south moved
of Bibles. Now that the tomes have returned to Mexico, historians there
into a region peopled by
can get a fresh look at their country’s pre-Hispanic past. —Jeremy Berlin
hunter-gatherers.
In Simms’s scenario
“the farmers come in large
numbers. They take over the
land, hunt all the game. The
hunter-gatherers are pushed
to the margins.” Under those
circumstances, he says, “this
art could be something of
an old tradition that they’re
holding on to for power pur-
poses.” —A. R. Williams

PHOTOS: FRANÇOIS GOHIER (TOP); CHRISTIE’S IMAGES/BRIDGEMAN IMAGES

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 EXPLORE

Us

At 7:35 a.m. on November 13, 1872, in the port city of Le Havre, France,
The Dawn of the art world changed forever. Claude Monet gazed out his hotel window
and began to paint what he saw. The result (above) was “Impression,
Impressionism Soleil Levant” (“Impression, Sunrise”)—and the birth of a movement.
How do we know exactly when Impressionism began? Because of
Donald Olson, a Texas State University astrophysicist who uses astronomy
to solve art and literary mysteries. When art historian Géraldine Lefebvre
and Marmottan Monet Museum deputy director Marianne Mathieu asked
Olson to help determine the painting’s provenance, the self-styled “ce-
lestial sleuth” began by poring over maps and photos to identify Monet’s
hotel and room. Then he turned to astronomy—using the rising sun and
the moon to determine the tide, season, and time of day—and consulted
digitized 19th-century weather observations. The final clues were the
smoke plumes in the painting, showing the wind blowing east to west.
Those findings—plus the “72” by Monet’s signature—closed the case
and put a precise time stamp on a timeless work of art. —Jeremy Berlin

PHOTO: HERITAGE IMAGE PARTNERSHIP/ART RESOURCE, NY

 EXPLORE
The Future of Food

Hungry for information? Make a selection from our menu of food

facts—and taste more at natgeofood.com.

2,000 SAY CHEESE!

There are more than 2,000
different kinds of cheese.

CORNED BEEF ON BOARD GRANDPA GRAPEFRUIT

In 1965 astronaut John Young A single pink grapefruit found in 1913
smuggled a corned beef sandwich is the ancestor of most
aboard the Gemini 3 spacecraft. pink grapefruit grown today.

+300%
RICE ON THE RISE!
The world price of rice jumped 300%
from November 2007 to April 2008.
FEED THE TEEN
MUSTARD MUSEUM One in four U.S. males between
There is a National Mustard Museum the ages of 6 and 19 consumes
in Middleton, Wisconsin. pizza on any given day.

PHOTO: REBECCA HALE, NGM STAFF. ART: ÁLVARO VALIÑO

 BECAUSE SOMEDAY

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 EXPLORE

Us

Pointing Flying was still in its intrepid, barnstorming days in the mid-1920s when
the U.S. Department of Commerce began establishing airways, prescribed
routes in the sky, to promote air commerce. How did pilots navigate their
the Way way cross-country in planes—some of them left over from World War I—
that had only rudimentary instruments? Often by peering down from the
cockpit to look for the big concrete arrows pointing the way.
It may have been either a slightly crazy or brilliantly simple scheme, or
both. More than a thousand concrete arrows were installed along the fed-
St. George, Utah eral airway system, says Phil Edwards, a technical information specialist at
the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum Library. Up to 70 feet long
and painted yellow or other highly visible colors, arrows were placed 10 to
15 miles apart and at night were illuminated by beacons. Pilots flying at low
altitudes, typically under 3,000 feet, could see from one to the next.
Metal arrows also were installed on some routes—but by the 1940s, the
system was largely superseded by radio aids to navigation. Today history
buffs have preserved or restored a few beacon sites, including one in Cibola
County in western New Mexico. Many abandoned arrows are overgrown or
crumbling. But dozens—like the one shown here—survive, especially in re-
mote areas along the transcontinental airway that ran from New York to San
Francisco. They remain to befuddle hikers and others who stumble upon
them, mysterious remnants of a more romantic era of flight. —Reed Karaim

Seattle
Spokane
WASH.
Portland Great Falls
Pasco ME.
Helena MONT. N. DAK.
OREG. Butte MINN. VT.
Medford Boise N.H.
Minneapolis WIS. Fond MICH. Bay Albany Boston
IDAHO City MASS.
S. DAK. du Lac Buffalo
WYO. La Crosse N.Y. R.I.
Rock Madison Milwaukee Detroit CONN.
Elko Springs Des Chicago Cleveland PA. New York
San Cheyenne North NEBR. Moines Toledo Pittsburgh Newark
Francisco Reno Platte Omaha IND.
Salt Lake OHIO N.J.
City IOWA Indianapolis MD.
San Jose NEV. Denver Lincoln Columbus DEL.
UTAH ILL. Cincinnati Washington, D.C.
COLO. Pueblo Kansas City St. Louis Springfield W. VA. VA.
Fresno Las Norfolk
St. George KANS. Louisville Richmond
CALIF. Vegas MO.
Wichita KY.
Kingman CIBOLA
COUNTY Nashville Charlotte N.C.
Los Angeles OKLA.
San Tulsa Little Memphis TENN.
ARIZ.
Diego Albuquerque Amarillo Oklahoma Rock S.C. Florence
Phoenix City Birmingham Atlanta
N. MEX. Fort ARK. MISS. Charleston
Tucson Big GA.
Spring Worth Monroe Selma ALA.
Savannah
Douglas Dallas Jackson Montgomery
El Paso Waco Jacksonville
TEXAS LA.
Austin Mobile
U.S. federal air routes, Nov. 1931
Houston New
Transcontinental San Orleans
Antonio FLA. West Palm Beach
Other
0 mi 200 Miami
Brownsville 0 km 200
Before pilots had radio navigation aids to guide
them along U.S. air routes, they found their way
by looking for the beacons and the concrete and
metal arrows that marked many of the routes.

PHOTO: JOHN TEAS, ST. GEORGE NEWS. MAP: JAMIE HAWK

SOURCE: NATIONAL AIR AND SPACE MUSEUM LIBRARY
 LEGAL NOTICE TO U.S. RESIDENTS

If you purchased a Bosch or Siemens 27” front-loading

washing machine, you may be entitled to a cash payment.
Includes: Nexxt, Vision, and ultraSense models
A Settlement has been reached in a class action lawsuit about
the advertising and effectiveness of Bosch and Siemens brand
27” front-loading washing machines (“Washers”). If you are the
original purchaser of a Washer you may be eligible for a cash
payment of $55 from a proposed Settlement.
Who’s included? The Settlement includes any U.S. residents
who are original purchasers of a Washer. You do not need to still
own the Washer.
What does the Settlement provide? If the Settlement is
approved and becomes final, Class Members who submit a
claim proving that they are the original purchaser of a Washer
will receive a $55 payment from the Settlement (unless they
previously received a full refund or free exchange of a Washer)
and will release all claims against Bosch and Siemens (see also
“What are my rights?” below).
How can I get a payment? File a claim online at www.
BoschSiemensWashingMachinesClassAction.com by May 28,
2015 or call 1-877-695-7474.
Who represents me? The Court has appointed Eppsteiner &
Fiorica Attorneys, LLP as Lead Counsel to represent the Class
in this case. You do not have to pay Class Counsel or anyone
else to participate. You may hire your own lawyer to represent
you at your expense.
What are my rights? You have a choice of whether to stay in
the Class or not. If you submit a claim, file an objection or do
nothing, you are choosing to stay in the Class, and you will be
bound by the Court’s decisions and the Parties’ Final Settlement
Agreement and Release. Any claims you may have against Bosch
and Siemens relating to the Washers will be released and you will
be forever barred from asserting these claims against them. If you
want to keep your right to sue the Defendant yourself, you must
exclude yourself from the Settlement Class by April 30, 2015.
If you exclude yourself, you cannot get a payment from this
Settlement. To ask to be excluded from the Class, send a letter to
Bosch Siemens Washing Machines Class Action Administrator,
PO Box 43340, Providence, RI 02940-3340, postmarked by April
30, 2015, stating you want to be excluded from Cobb v. BSH
Home Appliances Corp., Case No. 8:10-cv-00711. Include your
name, address, telephone number, and signature. If you stay in the
Settlement Class, you may object to the Settlement by April 30,
2015. Visit www.BoschSiemensWashingMachinesClassAction.
com for details about how to object.
The Court will hold a hearing on June 1, 2015 to consider
whether to approve the Settlement, a request for attorneys’ fees
and expenses of up to $6.5 million and a $5,000 payment to
each of the four Class Representatives. You or your own lawyer
may appear at the hearing at your own expense.

1-877-695-7474 www.BoschSiemensWashingMachinesClassAction.com
 Basic Instincts
A genteel disquisition on love and lust in the animal kingdom

Snakes’ Charming Moves

Drawing his chin along her skin. Coiling his body about hers. Jerking
RANGE
his head seductively, biting her, and vibrating his tail. In the Kama
Mexico, southwestern U.S. Sutra of snake sex, these are prime mating moves among colubroids,
the world’s largest family grouping of snakes with some 2,500 species.
CONSERVATION STATUS
Least concern
To see how snake courtship evolved, herpetologist and paleontolo-
gist Phil Senter studied data on 76 snakes of the Colubroidea and
OTHER FACTS Boidae groups. From research that included studies of fossil records
Gray-banded king snakes
(seen here) as well as rat,
dating to the Cretaceous period, he found that some colubroid come-
corn, and garter snakes be- ons are ancient—chin-rubbing, jerking—while the “coital bite” and “tail
long to the superfamily Colu- quiver” began later. In all, he says, it’s “quite the set of dance moves.”
broidea. Boas and anacondas The snake-atop-snake courtship position called mounting is
belong to the family Boidae.
“nearly universal” in the species studied, Senter wrote in the journal
PLOS ONE. However, he noted with clinical delicacy, mounting is not
required for “intromission,” aka copulation. To mate, snakes need only
to align the base of their tails at the cloaca, an opening serving both
reproductive and excretory systems. The male extends his hemipenes,
the two-pronged sex organ stored in his tail, and with each half depos-
its sperm into the female’s cloaca. The sex act can last for hours, Senter
says—commonly, longer than the courtship. —Patricia Edmonds

Photos of the gray-banded king snake (Lampropeltis

alterna) were shot at Texas’ Fort Worth Zoo.
PHOTOS: JOEL SARTORE
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VISIONS

United States
In Baltimore’s Druid
Hill Park, a dog named
Phoebe faces off with a
dandelion. To make this
shot, the photographer
held the flowering weed
at arm’s length, several
feet from Phoebe’s face,
and used his camera
flash to make the seed
head glow.
PHOTO: MICHAEL NORTHRUP

national geo graphic • April 

Iceland
Wearing masks of
silica mud at the Blue
Lagoon Spa, playful
Japanese pensioners
pretend to be zombies.
These warm geothermal
waters—100°F to 102°F
and rich in minerals—
are said to soothe
psoriasis and other skin
afflictions of the living.
PHOTO: CORNELIU CAZACU
United States
At the 140th Kentucky
Derby in Louisville,
Sophie Gillotti displays
her Kim Kardashian
cell phone case. The
celebrity wasn’t in
attendance this year,
but the 164,906 people
who were saw Califor-
nia Chrome carry the
day at Churchill Downs.
PHOTO: LANDON NORDEMAN

O Order prints of select National Geographic photos online at NationalGeographicArt.com.

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 VISIONS

YourShot.ngm.com Unexpected Discoveries

Assignment We asked members of the Your Shot community to turn their
cameras into witnesses, capturing moments neither anticipated nor planned.

EDITOR’S NOTE

“Serendipity doesn’t happen by accident. It comes when you put

yourself into situations where you know there will be photographs
and are open to whatever unfolds.” 
—Randy Olson, National Geographic photographer

Christina Leow Wan Hui

Singapore
Leow was surprised to see zebras in Nairobi’s Jomo
Kenyatta International Airport. While she waited for
a flight, she marveled at the large animal decals that
covered the windows—then raised her camera. “It
was a reaction to a very creative display,” she says.

Andrea Giacomini
Los Angeles, California
During a typically dry summer in southern California,
Giacomini went to pick up a friend. As he idled,
he noticed Griffith Park behind him was on fire. It
looked, he says, like an apocalyptic scene.
LIN
COLN On the 150th
anniversary
of the Great
Emancipator’s
assassination,
Americans along
the route of
his funeral train
reflect on his life
and legacy.

Children in Washington, D.C., view a plaster cast of a life mask of

Lincoln’s face, made nine weeks before his death in April 1865.
AT NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY, SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION


Thousands of New York commuters, like these in Harlem, travel daily
on sections of Lincoln’s funeral route, which ran more than 1,500 miles
from Washington, D.C., to Lincoln’s hometown of Springfield, Illinois.

We here highly resolve that…government of

shall not perish from the earth.
the people, by the people, for the people,
—Abraham Lincoln, Gettysburg Address, November 19, 1863
Let us have faith that
right makes might, and
in that faith, let us, to
the end, dare to do our
duty as we understand it.
—Abraham Lincoln, Cooper Union Address, February 27, 1860

The site of the president’s assassination has been restored at Ford’s

Theatre. This view is approximately the same one that John Wilkes
Booth had just before firing his weapon, a single-shot derringer pistol.
By Adam Goodheart
Photographs by Eugene Richards

T
 he black box nestles deep beneath the U.S.
Capitol, encased behind thick glass, caged by a metal
grille, as if it were a dangerous object, a ticking bomb
primed for its inevitable explosion. Perhaps in a sense it is.
In April 1865 carpenters constructed this velvet-draped
bier, known as the Lincoln catafalque, to display the
murdered president’s casket in the building’s of a cheap boardinghouse. Much less known is
Rotunda; its dark cloth conceals the rough pine the story of what followed. The nation mourned
boards they hastily nailed together. Since then, it Lincoln as it had never mourned before. In the
has been brought out each time a national mar- process, it not only defined the legacy of an
tyr or hero lies in state: James Garfield, William American hero, it also established a new ritual
McKinley, John F. Kennedy, Douglas MacAr- of American citizenship: the shared moment of
thur. The rest of the time it sits in a niche of the national tragedy, when a restless Republic’s busy
Capitol Visitor Center, passed without a glance life falls silent.
by most of the tourist throngs as it awaits the During the weeks after Lincoln’s death, as his
next great American death. funeral train made a circuitous journey from
Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, 150 years Washington, D.C., back to his hometown of
ago this month, has been recounted and reen- Springfield, Illinois, perhaps a million Ameri-
acted innumerable times: The fateful trip to the cans filed past the open coffin to glimpse their
theater, the pistol shot in the presidential box, fallen leader’s face. Millions more—as much as
the actor-assassin’s melodramatic leap to the one-third of the North’s population—watched
stage, and death’s arrival at last in the back room the procession pass.
That history isn’t so very far away: A 70-
Adam Goodheart is the author of 1861: The Civil something friend of mine recalls hearing his
War Awakening. Eugene Richards photographed grandfather talk about seeing the funeral cortege
“The New Oil Landscape” in the March 2013 issue. as a young boy in New York City. And even today,
 national geo graphic • April 
 Lincoln was the first person to lie in state on the U.S. Capitol’s
catafalque. Since then, 36 Americans have been honored on it,
including three other assassinated presidents.

as I recently discovered, to follow the route of
Lincoln’s train is to discover how much his spirit
still pervades the nation he loved and saved.
On the first day of Lincoln’s last journey, April
19, the line of soldiers, officials, and citizens fol-
lowing the hearse from the White House to the
Capitol stretched well over a mile—“the grand-
est procession ever seen on this continent,” a
reporter called it. During the days before the
murder, the city—and half the country—had
been celebrating the Confederate surrender at
Appomattox. Now the same flags hung to hail
victory were shrouded in black crepe.
Two days later, under drizzly skies, a nine-car
train pulled out of Washington’s main railway
station. It was headed north, yet just a few min-
utes into its journey it crossed into what had
very recently been slave territory.
From Freeland to New Freedom, the old train
tracks rise gently out of Maryland toward the
Pennsylvania hills. One of these auspiciously
named hamlets sits just south of the Mason-
Dixon Line separating the two states, the other
just north. Until Maryland enacted emancipa-
tion just five months before Lincoln’s death,
this line was like an electrified fence standing
Lincoln 
A HISTORIC JOURNEY A map published in an 1889 biography of Lincoln
outlines the circuitous journey to his final resting place in Springfield, Illinois.
Much of the route retraced Lincoln’s path to the capital for his 1861 inauguration.
REBECCA HALE, NGM STAFF; AT AMERICAN UNIVERSITY LIBRARY, WASHINGTON, D.C.

between four million people and liberty.
Today the old right-of-way on which Lin-
coln’s train passed, closed to rail traffic in the
1980s, has become a hiking trail. Rusted rails
emerge here and there from its grassy margins,
then sink again into the sod. A wooden post, a
bench, and a couple of picnic tables are all that
mark the Mason-Dixon Line itself. I sit down on
the bench, with the left half of me in the South
and the right half in the North, marveling at the
border’s utter invisibility. I watch a pale green
 national geo graphic • April 
inchworm as it traverses my shirtfront from
Pennsylvania into Maryland, then doubles back
and crosses the Mason-Dixon Line again.
Earth’s most impassable barriers—as Lincoln
the lawyer knew, as Lincoln the writer knew—
are often those formed not of walls and trenches,
nor even of mountains and oceans, but of laws
and words. At this spot, as at no historic site I’ve
visited, I feel the terrible arbitrariness of slavery.
But Lincoln also knew that a line made of laws
and words, no matter how formidable, could be
erased with new laws and words. He made this
line cease to exist. No wonder newly freed Af-
rican Americans lined the sides of these tracks
throughout the first day of his funeral journey.
Invisible lines still cross the American land-
scape, of course—if not between slavery and
emancipation, at least between different people’s
ideas of liberty. Lincoln and the Civil War are
still a touchstone for many. A couple of miles
north of New Freedom, back in my car now,
I spot a Chevy Tahoe with a Confederate flag
bumper sticker and follow it into the parking
lot across from the Mason-Dixon Restaurant.
The driver is on his way to the liquor store, but
he’s happy to chat.
Keith Goettner is a retired state trooper, a lean
man with a scraggly gray mustache and intense
blue eyes; it’s not hard to imagine him in an
1860s tintype. He had 13 ancestors who fought
for the Union, he tells me, and three for the
Confederacy—but he’s cast his own allegiance
with the Rebels. They stood for a certain kind of
Lincoln 
Everyone—white and
black—knew that
Lincoln’s role in ending
slavery had spawned the
murderous hatred that
took his life.
freedom, he says: “It’s about the right to choose
to do what you want, as long as it’s legal. If you
really dig into Confederate belief, they were very
patriotic. They didn’t want war—they wanted to
be left alone.”
There is irony, to say the least, in identify-
ing the slaveholding Confederacy with personal
freedom. But many people share Goettner’s view
of liberty in this conservative section of rural
Pennsylvania. Not far up the road, I stop at
the Freedom Armory shooting range and gun
store—“Your Second Amendment Connection,”
its sign says—and meet the owner, a crew cut
Louisiana transplant named Scott Morris. We
chat politely across an immaculate glass case
where the merchandise has names like Patriot,
Savage, and Grenadier.
“I served in the military in Berlin during the
Cold War, 110 miles behind the Iron Curtain,”
Morris tells me. “On many different levels, I
know what freedom is. Without the right to bear
arms, we’d have no freedom.”
I ask Morris what he thinks about Lincoln
and his legacy. “I appreciate a lot of the things
he did,” he says. “But I wonder if we’re better or
worse off today. We’d be better off with more
states’ rights.”
In Lincoln’s day too this area was known
for its Southern sympathies. But Philadelphia,
which the funeral train reached on April 22, was
a hub of abolitionism. The president lay in state
at Independence Hall beside a black-shrouded
Liberty Bell, which the antislavery movement
had adopted as a symbol. Day and night some
 national geo graphic • April 
100,000 mourners filed through the chamber
where the Declaration of Independence and the
Constitution had been signed.
Lincoln had made a memorable and strangely
prophetic visit here four years earlier. In Febru-
ary 1861, on his way to his first inauguration
and with war imminent, he raised the Ameri-
can flag at dawn over the venerable building. In
brief, impromptu—and still little remembered—
remarks to the crowd, Lincoln spoke powerfully
about the meaning of the declaration.
The document wasn’t merely about freeing
Americans from Britain, he said. Rather there
was “something in that Declaration giving lib-
erty, not alone to the people of this country, but
hope to the world for all future time. It was that
which gave promise that in due time the weights
should be lifted from the shoulders of all men,
and that all should have an equal chance.” A mo-
ment later he added: “If this country cannot be
saved without giving up that principle—I was
about to say I would rather be assassinated on
this spot than to surrender it.”
Lincoln’s words still resonate strongly with
Ada Bello, who met me at Independence Hall.
Beginning in the 1960s she and other activists
gathered here for some of the first gay-rights
demonstrations in American history. Back then
a few dozen marchers were often outnumbered
by wary police and catcalling onlookers. Now a
state historical marker honors the protesters—
and just a few weeks before my visit, Pennsylva-
nia began allowing same-sex couples to marry.
The stories of the soft-spoken, 81-year-old
Bello sound almost like tales of the Under-
ground Railroad. In the early days of the move-
ment, which she joined after immigrating to
the U.S. from her native Cuba, the very idea of
homosexual rights seemed to most Americans
laughable at best, dangerous at worst—except to
the men and women whose lives were stunted by
persecution and secrecy. Police regularly raided
the city’s gay bars; public exposure ended careers
and drove some people to suicide. “Marriage
wasn’t even in the realm of possibility.”
Although that idea would have seemed
even more far-fetched in Lincoln’s time, Bello
In the 1860s—when the nation’s rail system was a tangle of small local lines—
transporting the funeral car halfway across the continent was a technical feat.
Two dozen different locomotives, including this one in Ohio, drew the train.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

doesn’t hesitate to claim him as a kindred soul.
America’s 18th-century founders framed grand
but imperfect ideas in this building, she says. “I
think Abraham Lincoln actually realized that
unless you apply those principles to everybody,
it’s a false promise. He understood the need to
bring other minorities in.”
Several days before the funeral train arrived,
municipal authorities decreed that no black
marchers would be allowed in the procession.
Edwin Stanton, the secretary of war, sent a furi-
ous telegram from Washington overruling the
ban, but the intimidation had worked. The vast
parade down Broadway on April 24 included
Irish firemen by the thousands, German march-

H
e died for me! He died for me! God
bless him!”
Those words, spoken through tears
by an elderly woman as she watched Lincoln’s
coffin pass through the streets of lower Manhat-
tan, captured how she and many other African
Americans felt about the president’s death. Ev-
eryone—white and black—knew that Lincoln’s
role in ending slavery had spawned the murder-
ous hatred that took his life. Understandably,
African Americans hoped to take their places
in the front ranks of the mourners; more than
5,000 planned to march in New York City. But
many white Americans had different ideas.
ing bands, Italian social clubs, Roman Catholic
priests, and Jewish rabbis, as well as special
delegations of bakery employees, cigarmakers,
Freemasons, glee club members, and temper-
ance activists. A couple of hundred African
Americans brought up the very rear.
To retrace Lincoln’s funeral route today is to
be reminded often of that bitter lesson. In Buf-
falo I visit the city’s 19th-century landmarks:
not just the terminus of the Erie Canal, once
the gateway to the West, but also relics such
as the Michigan Street Baptist Church, built
in the 1840s as a hub of the city’s intellectually
vibrant and politically active black community.
Lincoln 
Near Philadelphia, this section of Amtrak’s busy Northeast Corridor
line runs along the 19th-century rail route. Bells tolled and cannon
fired salutes at every town and village along this part of the journey.

In this and like communities, public sentiment

can fail; without it, nothing can succeed.
is everything. With public sentiment, nothing
—Abraham Lincoln, first Lincoln-Douglas Debate, August 21, 1858
Nationally renowned activists and preachers
spoke in the handsome, sun-drenched sanctu-
ary; fugitive slaves took shelter in the basement.
Over the next century, a neighborhood of shops,
restaurants, and clubs grew and flourished in the
surrounding blocks.
Today Buffalo is one of the poorest cities in
the nation and among the most racially balkan-
ized. The old church stands marooned in a bleak
urban landscape. Its present-day pastor, Bishop
Clarence Montgomery, tells me that only half
of the city’s young African Americans finish
high school. Despite a few glimmers of hope—
such as a historic jazz club that now houses an
impressive museum of Buffalo’s rich musical
heritage—most of the surrounding blocks are
dominated by vacant storefronts, public housing,
and shotgun-style houses. I’m surprised when,
just a few blocks north along Michigan Avenue,
the urban decay gives way to another world: a
strip of gleaming hospital buildings and offices,
with more under construction nearby. It’s the
city’s new medical corridor, a promising sign
of economic recovery—except that almost ev-
eryone I see, from the patients to the medical
workers to the construction crews, is white.
“Michigan Avenue is becoming our Mason-
Dixon Line,” says George Arthur, a former city
council president and longtime leader among
local African Americans. “The medical corridor

is bringing prosperity to the white community,
but almost none of that reaches our black com-
munity, which has one of the highest unemploy-
ment rates in the country.”
Indeed, Arthur tells me that when it comes
to racial disparities, history seems to move
backward as often as forward. “One of the first
lawsuits in America to integrate public schools
started in Buffalo in 1868,” he says. That ef-
fort succeeded, but by the time Arthur entered
politics nearly a century later, de facto segrega-
tion had long since returned to the schools. He
helped lead a successful movement to integrate
them in the 1970s. “But now the schools have
resegregated again, and we’re back in the same
boat as in the ’60s,” he observes. “Both the 1960s
and the 1860s, take your choice.”
 national geo graphic • April 
O
n its journey up the Hudson River,
across the Empire State, and down the
shores of Lake Erie, Lincoln’s funeral
train rode the same rail corridors that Amtrak
now uses. In fact, even as the journey unfolded,
the railroad baron Cornelius Vanderbilt was at a
critical moment in his struggle to forge a single
corporate dominion out of antebellum America’s
dozens of small local lines.
In 1860s America the railroad was more than
just a new technology—it was a kind of national
cult. A few months before the end of the Civil
War, the abolitionist leader William Lloyd Gar-
rison waxed mystical about the revolution that
trains had brought, fostering not just economic
prosperity but also human connection on a vast
scale: “So may the modes of communication
Millions of Americans who didn’t witness the funeral pageantry in person
still caught vivid glimpses via new technology. Placed in a stereoscope, this
double image offered a 3-D view of the cortege passing down Broadway.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

and the ties of life continue to multiply, until all
nations shall feel a common sympathy and wor-
ship of a common shrine!”
Little remains of the Civil War–era railroad
network traveled by the funeral train between
Columbus, Ohio, and Chicago, Illinois. But as
I get accustomed to the landscape, I find I can
sense the railroad like a vanished limb: a down-
town street that’s wider than it needs to be, a
vacant lot beside a grain elevator, a long straight
groove through the middle of a farmer’s soybean
field. I’ll pull over, find a telltale scatter of old
gravel and broken glass, and tell myself, Lincoln
passed here too.
Sometimes at these places I find signs warn-
ing of buried fiber-optic lines. Data companies
often use the old railroad rights-of-way to run
their cables—just as, in the late 1850s, telegraph
companies ran their wires here. The multiplica-
tion that Garrison prophesied continues apace.
Even in these remote hamlets, people would
have known of John Wilkes Booth’s crime just
hours after the assassin’s bullet found its mark.
Two weeks later, when the train came, they knew
to expect this rendezvous with the dead presi-
dent. The train traveled by night between the big
cities—but not in darkness, for at almost every
rural crossing, bonfires blazed. At three o’clock,
four o’clock in the morning, as many as ten thou-
sand people gathered at some village depots, an
unimaginable thing in a time and place where life
was still lived mostly from sunup to sundown.
Bands played dirges as the farmers and their fam-
ilies waited in the chill. In Greenfield, Indiana,
Lincoln 
Lincoln’s funeral train made a brief stop in Syracuse, New York, on April 26,
1865. Today black and white parishioners worship together at Grace Church,
• to become integrated in the 1950s.
one of the city’s first congregations
As I would not be a slave, so I
would not be a master. This
expresses my idea of democracy.
—Abraham Lincoln, written fragment, ca August 1, 1858

A toy in Tilda Pegg’s yard in Straughn, Indiana, belonged to her son, now a grown man. When
the funeral train passed through in the predawn hours of April 30, two coffins were inside:
Lincoln’s and the exhumed remains • of his young son Willie, who died of typhoid in 1862.
Mourners collected
relics as if of a saint.
Within hours of Lincoln’s
death, a bit of his blood-
stained shirt would
fetch a $5 gold piece.
word came by telegraph that the train was just a
few miles up the line. A young veteran, to pass
those last minutes, read Lincoln’s Second Inau-
gural aloud to the throng. As the black locomo-
tive approached, the town minister led a prayer.
Then firelight flickered briefly on the funeral car
itself, the glossy paint and silver-fringed crepe,
the small windows revealing nothing of the awful
cargo within. Nearly everyone was weeping now.
At last a whistle sounded, and the machine, and
history, passed on.
P
eace looks like this: On a warm Sunday
afternoon, on an artificial lake in subur-
ban Chicago, people are paddling a boat.
It’s only when they’re back onshore that I notice
one of them is limping. He’s young and athletic,
but he leans on a cane like an old man.
The young veteran is Brad Schwarz, who will
spend the rest of his life with the consequences
of what happened to him one morning in Iraq,
in the fall of 2008. That’s when the Humvee he
was riding in struck an improvised bomb. He
survived, albeit gravely wounded in body and
psyche. Back home he slept with one loaded pis-
tol under his pillow and another in the bedside
dresser. One night he awoke from a nightmare to
find that he was slamming his wife’s head against
the wall, hallucinating that she was an attacker.
Schwarz tells me that he was always interested
in history and that when he first volunteered to
serve in Iraq, he felt as if he was participating
in one of the great events of his era, much as
soldiers in the Civil War or World War II had
 national geo graphic • April 
done. But that soon changed. “While I was there,
I didn’t feel like I was participating in history—I
was just doing my job,” he tells me. “And I didn’t
think we were changing anything for the better.
I lost so many friends and spilled my own blood
and tears and sweat there, and sometimes I feel
like it was for nothing.”
The Civil War felt equally pointless and awful
to many Americans in the spring of 1865. The
conflict had been self-evidently unnecessary, a
matter not of foreign invasion but of domestic
politics gone badly awry. Now three-quarters of
a million men were dead. Many families never
had a body to bury or a relic to cherish: So many
boys and men had simply vanished into the mud
of Virginia or Tennessee.
Perhaps that was why Americans mourned
Lincoln’s Good Friday martyrdom with such in-
tensity. “People were still getting notice of their
loved ones’ dying,” says historian Martha Hodes,
author of Mourning Lincoln, a new book on the
president’s death and its aftermath. “Lincoln’s fu-
neral was like a stand-in for the brother or son
or father whose body would never come home.”
Perhaps that’s also why people cared so much
about not just seeing Lincoln’s coffin pass but fil-
ing past to view his corpse—and why the casket
was not closed even when, after two weeks, the
embalming techniques of the day began to fail
and the dead man’s face turned dark and sunken.
Mourners collected relics as if of a saint: a
snippet of drapery from the catafalque, a scrap
of crepe from the funeral train. Within hours of
Lincoln’s death, a bit of his bloodstained shirt
would fetch a five-dollar gold piece. Many of
these souvenirs survive in museums today. But
what I find most affecting are the remnants of
wreaths and bouquets still preserved after a cen-
tury and a half. A single leaf of laurel, a rose-
bud faded to rusty orange: slain offerings, as if
springtime itself had been offered as a sacrifice.
The train’s last stop before Springfield was,
appropriately, the town of Lincoln, Illinois, 30
miles north. More than a decade earlier, when
the future president was still a state legislator,
it had become the first of the many American
towns that would be named in his honor.
 I stop in Lincoln myself late one afternoon.
It’s a sleepy place, the Victorian storefronts gone
shabby. The main square, with its hulking court-
house, is nearly deserted except for a few teenage
kids circling on their low-slung bikes, idly pop-
ping wheelies and bucking down a low flight of
stairs. At a corner of the big old building, I spot
a white marble column: the kind of Civil War
monument I’ve seen in almost every county seat
these past thousand miles and more.
A hundred years of acid rain have eroded the
names of the dead men and their fatal battles, leav-
ing the monument looking like a relic of ancient
Egypt or Babylon, not a memorial to the grand-
fathers’ grandfathers of men and women alive
in the town today. Blurred fragments of words
emerge: “TOMLINSO … DAVI … SHILOH.”
A more recent marker nearby quotes a local
newspaper article from April 1862, a year into
the war: “It takes but small space in the columns
of our paper to report the ‘killed and wounded’
from our county, but oh!…Every name in the list
is a lightning stroke to some fond heart.”
As I stop to read, one of the bike-riding teen-
agers, a scruffy blond kid wearing a baseball cap
backward, coasts up and asks what I’m doing.
Before long, he’s spilling out stories about Lin-
coln—the town and the president (“Abraham,” he
says familiarly) all mixed up together. Tim Evans
is 17, an 11th grader with a jumble of plans for
the future. He wants to be an architect. He wants
to be an underwater welder. He wants to go pro
with his stunt biking. I point to the marble col-
umn and ask if he’s ever thought of the military.
“Sometimes,” he says doubtfully. But he’s got
other plans. Just like the names on this monu-
ment, I think, just like the three-quarters of a
million other names on other monuments—each
one the remnant of a life once as complicated, as
tentative, as optimistic as this one.
L
incoln was buried at last in Springfield on
May 4, nearly three weeks after his death.
Townsfolk draped black bunting over the
simple frame house that he had last seen on the
morning he departed for the presidency. They
tracked down his favorite horse, the one the
Lincolns had named Old Bob, which had been
sold into service pulling a wagon. The animal
walked in the procession to the cemetery, led
by a local African-American minister who had
worked for the Lincolns as a handyman.
The tomb, I find, is a disappointment. Twice
reconstructed since 1865—most recently, in
the 1930s, in incongruous Art Deco style—its
current incarnation has all the historic char-
acter of an office lobby. (The coffin was moved
no fewer than 14 times in the decades after its
original burial, as if no one could figure out
quite what to do with it.) Lengthy inscriptions
on the wall, relics of their time, recount nearly
every biographical detail except the Emancipa-
tion Proclamation. The body, a guide tells the
crowd of tourists, lies under ten feet of concrete.
It’s strange to think that there is a place where
Lincoln still physically exists in the world, let
alone that it’s a place like this.
Several hours later I make my way to anoth-
er graveyard a few miles distant. There’s not a
living soul at this one when I arrive, just row
upon row of identical white headstones. Here
at Camp Butler National Cemetery are buried
more than a thousand Civil War dead, mostly
men who died of disease under miserable con-
ditions at the nearby training camp and mili-
tary prison. All are equal beneath the clean-cut
marble slabs: officers and privates, black men
and white. Northerners and Southerners too,
for here are hundreds of Confederate prison-
ers: Texas cavalrymen, Arkansas infantrymen,
teenage boys from Tennessee and Alabama,
stranded far from the soil they fought to defend.
Many of the stones bear no names, but most
have dates. I begin to notice an unusual number
from the spring of 1865; perhaps an epidemic
swept the camp then. There’s a whole section
from the first week or two of April, including
a few dated April 14 and 15, the same time as
the assassination in far-off Washington. One of
these is for a soldier of the U.S. Colored Troops.
If the choice were mine, Lincoln too would
rest here, side by side with such comrades,
among the thickly clustered ranks of these
honored dead. j
Lincoln 
Henry and Mahesha Langstraat dress their one-year-old son, Marley,
in Brooklyn. Race relations have progressed since Lincoln abolished
slavery, though more than 100 years passed before laws criminalizing
interracial marriage were struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court.
These men ask for…the same
thing: fairness, and fairness
only. This, so far as in my power,
they, and all others, shall have.
—Abraham Lincoln, letter, May 30, 1860

In Philadelphia, about a mile from the funeral route, Abdoulaye Ndiaye—whose

family emigrated from Senegal—plays football for the Abraham Lincoln High
School Rail Splitters. Some 200 American towns and cities, and more than 600
schools, are named in memory of the 16th U.S. president.
1860 The first portrait
of Lincoln by famed
photographer Mathew
Brady became the basis
of widely disseminated
campaign posters. Less
than nine months after
this portrait was made,
Lincoln was elected
to the White House.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

1858

1863
1859 1860 1860

Lincoln the politician understood the

power of a portrait. As this gallery
shows, he sat for many during the
last years of his life. In 1858, at age
49, Lincoln the lawyer (top left, in
linen suit) argued and won his most
celebrated criminal case; later that
year he lost a second bid for the
U.S. Senate. During the presidential
campaign of 1860, an 11-year-old
supporter urged candidate Lincoln
to grow a beard, “for your face is
so thin.” He heeded the girl’s advice,
as seen in a photograph made
almost three weeks after his election
(above). In subsequent portraits
Lincoln shows the mounting strain
of leading a nation sundered by civil
war. Early in 1865 he had his hair
trimmed to keep it out of the plaster
used to make his second and
final life mask.

TOP ROW, FROM FAR LEFT: ABRAHAM M. BYERS; ART ARCHIVE/

CULVER PICTURES/ART RESOURCE, NY. SAMUEL M. FASSETT;
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. PRESTON BUTLER; LIBRARY OF
CONGRESS. SAMUEL G. ALSCHULER; LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
BOTTOM ROW: ALEXANDER GARDNER; LIBRARY OF CONGRESS.
MATHEW BRADY; GETTY IMAGES. LEWIS E. WALKER; LIBRARY
OF CONGRESS

1864 1865
 LINCOLN
HIS FACE WEARS THE STRUGGLES OF A NATION

I
t is a face handsome and homely, sorrow-
ful and mirthful, penetrating and opaque.
Amid the contradictions stamped into
nearly a half trillion pennies is one truth: Abra-
ham Lincoln’s face is unforgettable. But it is a
visage that we, 150 years after his death, will
never truly know. Lincoln’s personal secretary,
John G. Nicolay, described “the long gamut of
expression from grave to gay, and back again
from the rollicking jollity of laughter to that
serious, far-away look that with prophetic in-
tuitions beheld the awful panorama of war, and
heard the cry of oppression and suffering.” Per-
haps this is why Nicolay wrote:

“There are
many pictures
of Lincoln;
there is
no portrait
of him.”

ca 1846 Born in poverty
and “raised to farm work,”
Lincoln the rough-hewn
rail-splitter had, by age 37,
become a prosperous lawyer
in Springfield, Illinois. This
daguerreotype, made shortly
after he was elected to the
U.S. Congress, is his earliest
confirmed portrait.
NICHOLAS H. SHEPHERD; LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
1865 “With the fearful strain that
is on me night and day,” said
Lincoln, “if I did not laugh, I should
die.” Humor offered the president
a brief respite from the pressures
of his embattled administration.
The heavy toll of those years is
apparent in this portrait made
less than three months before
his fateful visit to Ford’s Theatre.
ALEXANDER GARDNER; LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
HUBBLE’S GREATEST HITS
Pictures from the space telescope have dazzled us for 25 years.
Now, Hubble’s lead imaging scientist picks his top 10 celestial views.


COSMIC FIREWORKS Sparkling with energy, a cluster of young stars lights up a cavity in
the roiling dust of the Tarantula Nebula. For Zoltan Levay, charged with bringing Hubble
Space Telescope imagery to the public, the scene’s dynamism is irresistible. “Stars
are being born, stars are dying,” he says. “There’s a vast amount of material churning.”
10
NASA; ESA; F. PARESCE, INAF-IASF, BOLOGNA, ITALY; R. O’CONNELL, UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA; WIDE FIELD CAMERA 3 SCIENCE OVERSIGHT COMMITTEE
 9
STAR POWER
Hubble’s Wide Field
Camera 3 looks through
the Horsehead Nebula
in a uniquely detailed
infrared image. A
classic target of
astronomy, the nebula
normally appears
dark against a bright
background, but Hubble
penetrates the shroud
of interstellar dust and
gas. It’s a hint of what to
expect from NASA’s
planned infrared James
Webb Space Telescope,
Levay says.
MOSAIC OF FOUR IMAGES
NASA; ESA; HUBBLE HERITAGE
TEAM, STSCI/AURA
Zoltan Levay,
Space Telescope
Science Institute
(STScI) imaging team
leader, has worked
on Hubble images
since 1993. These
are his ten favorites.
PHOTO: REBECCA HALE,
NGM STAFF
 8
GALACTIC WALTZ
The interplay of their
gravitational forces
bends two spiral
galaxies, collectively
known as Arp 273, as
they approach and
prepare to merge
300 million light-years
away. “It looks to me
like they’re in a dance,”
Levay says. “They’ll
orbit around each other
for eons and finally
come together.”
NASA; ESA; HUBBLE HERITAGE
TEAM, STSCI/AURA
By Timothy Ferris

I t didn’t amount
to much at first.
Launched into orbit aboard the space shuttle
Discovery on April 24, 1990, amid flurries of
hope and hype, the Hubble Space Telescope
promptly faltered. Rather than remaining locked
on its celestial targets, it trembled and shook,
quaking like a photophobic vampire whenever
sunlight struck its solar panels. Opening its pro-
tective front door to let starlight in perturbed
the telescope so badly that it fell into an elec-
tronic coma. Worst of all, Hubble turned out to
be myopic. Its primary light-gathering mirror,
eight feet in diameter and said to be the smooth-
est large object ever fashioned by humans, had
been figured perfectly wrong.
Its design was already a compromise. The
astronomers had wanted a bigger telescope in
a higher orbit. They got a smaller one orbiting
only 350 miles high, so that it could fit in the
shuttle’s cargo bay and remain within reach for
servicing by astronauts working in space. Some
grumbled that science was being subordinated
to flyboy flash.
Yet the shuttle proved to be the mission’s salva-
tion. Had Hubble been lofted beyond the shuttle’s
reach, it might have gone down in history as a
billion-dollar blunder. Instead it was constructed
so that its key components, from cameras and
computers to gyroscopes and radio transmitters,
remained accessible for replacement or repair.
One astronaut took this requirement so seriously
that he visited the Smithsonian’s National Air and
Space Museum after-hours, put a ladder up to its
Hubble replica, and practiced swapping out in-
struments to make sure everything fit. Everything
did, and five nearly perfect shuttle service mis-
sions proved essential in transforming Hubble
from a 12-ton dud into one of the world’s most
productive and popular scientific machines.
ALL IMAGES ARE COLORIZED COMPOSITES FROM BLACK-AND-WHITE ORIGINALS. 
IN SOME, MULTIPLE COMPOSITE IMAGES ARE ASSEMBLED INTO A MOSAIC.
 7
NEAR AND FAR
In a deep-focus image,
bright stars shine nearby
in the Milky Way. Most of
the other stars shown,
including the cluster at
bottom, are in the
Andromeda galaxy.
Billions of light-years
beyond, entire galaxies
glow. Levay: “It may
not look like much, but
what we see is nothing
less than the entire
sweep of the cosmos in
a single image.”
NASA; ESA; T. M. BROWN, STSCI
 Hubble literally expanded the frontiers of
human knowledge. Using it to peer deep into
space and back in cosmic time with unprec-
edented clarity, astronomers learned that galax-
ies formed from smaller patches of stuff in the
early universe (“bottom-up,” in the terminol-
ogy of researchers who’d wrestled with this issue
for decades) and that massive galaxies typically
harbor supermassive black holes at their cen-
ters. Hubble examinations of dim dwarf stars
confirmed that normal matter cannot generate
nearly enough gravity to hold galaxies together,
which means that the “dark matter” responsi-
ble must be made of more exotic stuff. Hubble
measurements of galaxy velocities yielded early
clues to the existence of “dark energy,” the mys-
terious force currently speeding up the cosmic
expansion rate.
Just recently, Hubble researchers have cap-
tured light from a newborn galaxy seen as it
looked 13 billion years ago, taken the tempera-
ture of a hot planet orbiting a star 260 light-years
from Earth, and discovered three icy objects in
the outer solar system that might provide an
even farther-out destination for NASA’s New
Horizons probe after it flies past Pluto in July.
The space telescope’s global popularity surely
arises, though, not only from its scientific attain-
ments but also from the memorable images it
has produced of glittering galaxies, softly glow-
6
ing nebulae, and the wreckage of shattered stars.
CELESTIAL WINGS
While Hubble was being built and launched, Gas from a dying star
such photos were routinely disparaged in NASA resembles a butterfly,
circles as mere public relations fodder, called its lacy wings formed
“pretties.” But a quarter century later the cosmic by the ejection of its
scenes assembled by Zoltan Levay and his col- outer layers. Unique
leagues at the Space Telescope Science Institute and colorful planetary
have, in the words of NASA historian Steven J. nebulae like NGC 6302
Dick, “enhanced the very idea of what we call have provided some of
‘culture.’ ” That human beings find them to be Hubble’s most popular
as beautiful and evocative as photos of earthly images. “They’re
beautiful,” Levay says,
sunsets and mountain peaks affirms anew that
“but some very complex
nature is all of a piece, and that we’re part of it. j dynamics and phenom-
ena shape these things.”
Timothy Ferris frequently reports from the universe NASA; ESA; HUBBLE SM4 ERO TEAM

for the magazine. His last story, on dark matter and

dark energy, appeared in the January 2015 issue.

Hubble’s greatest hits 

 5
SPECTRAL VISION
What looks like a ghostly
ring suspended in the
heavens is really a gas
bubble 23 light-years
across, the remnant of
a supernova explosion
first observed in our sky
400 years ago. “The
simplicity of this image
is haunting,” says Levay,
“but deceptive.” Myriad
forces ripple the
bubble’s surface and
distort its shape.
NASA; ESA; HUBBLE HERITAGE TEAM,
STSCI/AURA. J. HUGHES, RUTGERS
UNIVERSITY
 4
ECHO OF LIGHT
Over several months in
2002, Hubble captured
a cosmic spectacle—a
ragged balloon of dust
that appeared to
expand around the star
V838 Monocerotis. In
reality, an expanding
blast of the star’s light
was illuminating the
dust cloud. Levay: “It’s
rare to be able
to watch something
change this dramatically
on a human timescale.”
NASA; ESA; H. E. BOND, STSCI

MORE ONLINE
ngm.com/more
TELEVISION

See Hubble’s
History Unfold
Tune in to the National
Geographic Channel on April 20
for Hubble’s Cosmic Journey.
Narrated by Neil deGrasse
Tyson, the special covers the
telescope’s 25-year history, from
conception to major events.

INTERACTIVE GALLERY
Now it’s YOUR turn.
Browse our extended
gallery of Hubble images,
then tell us which ones are
your favorites—and why.
 HATS OFF

3 This spectacular image of the spiral Sombrero galaxy, seen almost

edge on from Earth, holds a “large emotional connection” for Levay.
He remembers fondly a college professor who recounted awestruck
nights viewing the galaxy through an observatory telescope.
MOSAIC OF SIX IMAGES. NASA; HUBBLE HERITAGE TEAM, STSCI/AURA
 STELLAR TUMULT

2 Star birth and star death create cosmic havoc in a panorama of the Carina
Nebula assembled from multiple Hubble images. “Visually it’s so rich,” Levay
says, “and it took so much effort to put together. It has to be a favorite.”
Data from a terrestrial telescope contributed colors keyed to elements.
MOSAIC OF 32 IMAGES
HUBBLE IMAGE: NASA; ESA; N. SMITH, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY; HUBBLE HERITAGE TEAM, STSCI/AURA
CERRO TOLOLO INTER-AMERICAN OBSERVATORY IMAGE: N. SMITH; NOAO/AURA/NSF
 1
PEERLESS BEAUTY
This iconic Hubble
image of the spiral
galaxy NGC 1300 is
suffused with detail—
bright blue young stars,
the dust lanes spiraling
around the bright
nucleus, distant
galaxies shining
through. “You can just
lose yourself in it,” says
Levay. Many have.
MOSAIC OF TWO IMAGES
NASA; ESA; HUBBLE HERITAGE TEAM,
STSCI/AURA. P. KNEZEK, WIYN
Coal worker Ajay Marijan carries a load
from an open-pit mine to a waiting truck
in Bokapahari, Jharkhand state.


How Coal
Fuels India’s
Insurgency
In mineral-rich jungles Maoist militants
find a foothold through violence and extortion.
Indigenous women pose in front of
a painted scene at the annual festival
in the village of Orchha, in Chhattisgarh
state’s Abujmarh forest—the main base
of the Maoist rebels known as Naxalites.
At an ad hoc restaurant, men prepare
breakfast for workers clocking in
for the morning shift at the coal-based
Jindal Tamnar thermal power plant,
in the Raigarh district, Chhattisgarh.
By Anthony Loyd
Photographs by Lynsey Addario
T he gunman at the jungle’s edge
lived and died by different names. Some knew
him as Prashant, others as Paramjeet. Occasion-
ally he called himself Gopalji, trading the alias
with another insurgent leader to further confuse
the Indian authorities trying to hunt him down.
When I met him, he was fresh from killing,
and called himself by yet another name. “Com-
rade Manas,” he said as he stepped from the
shadows beneath a huge walnut tree, machine
gun in hand, a slight figure, his frame and fea-
tures burned out and cadaverous with the depre-
dations of malaria and typhoid, war and jungle.
The day was already old and the sun low.
The silhouettes of a dozen or so other gunmen
lurked in the deepening green of the nearby
paddy fields, watchful and waiting. Manas
and his men were on the move and had little
time to talk.
In India they are known by a single word,
Naxalites: Maoist insurgents at the heart of the
nation’s longest running and most deeply en-
trenched internal conflict. Their decades-long
war, which costs India more lives today than
the embers of the conflict in Kashmir, has been
described by former premier Manmohan Singh
as India’s “greatest internal security threat.”
Anthony Loyd is a special correspondent for the
Times of London, where he has worked for 22 years.
Photojournalist Lynsey Addario’s memoir, It’s What
I Do (Penguin Press), came out in February.
 national geo graphic • April 
Standing in the
back of a truck,
a man collects the
body of his son,
Nakul Munda, in the
village of Heso in
Jharkhand. Naxalites
shot the teenager
for allegedly being a
police informant.
In the spate of violence  hours before our
rendezvous, Manas, just  years old, and his
men had killed six policemen and wounded
eight more in an ambush across the range of
low hills at whose base we now met.
The attack had put the Naxalites back on the
front pages of India’s newspapers, and security
forces were on the move in angry response. Pa-
trols and helicopters circled the area, sweeping
through villages and probing into the jungle.
By rights, the Naxalites should have been
relics of history, rather than fighting and kill-
ing in the name of Mao long after the Chinese
communist leader’s death, in a country he had
never even visited—a nuclear power at that.
Yet their war, fought in the back blast of India’s
energy boom, had been thrown a lifeline by the
demands of development and the globalized
economy, as mineral exploitation and land
rights became catalysts of a revitalized struggle.
In this way India’s energy needs and industry’s
hunger for raw materials linked the angry killers
in the jungle to coal, steel, and power produc-
tion, welding the Naxalites to some of the most
disadvantaged communities in the country—the
Adivasis, India’s original tribal dwellers. Rather
than becoming an anomaly from the past, the
Naxalite insurgency—fueled by intimidation,
extortion, and violence—has come to symbol-
ize a conflict prophetic of the future. It pits de-
velopment against tradition, with India’s most
mineral-rich states at the epicenter.
Indeed Manas, already a Naxalite “zone com-
mander” despite his youth, seemed certain that
the social grievances of the poor would even-
tually ensure victory for his cause. He regarded
the overthrow of the Delhi government as
an inevitability.
“An adult tiger grows old and dies,” he assured
me, his eyes glowing with the luminosity of radi-
cals the world over, “just as the government we
are trying to oust is old, decaying, and ready to
die. Our revolution is young and bound to grow.
These are the laws of the universe. In a battle
between politicians and a new society run by the
people, the people are bound to win.”
He spoke until the last of the sun had dipped
beneath the tree line, and then he slipped off into
the shadows with his men. The security forces
were getting closer, and they had no wish to be-
come encircled.
The next time I saw his face, Manas was
dead. It stared at me from a roadside shrine in
the impoverished village where he had been
India’s Insurgency 
born. Local people told me that he had been
slain in a gun battle not long after our meeting.
Only by reading the inscription on the stone did
I learn the real identity of the insurgent with
many names: Lalesh.
The Naxalites’ war always began where the
road ended. Everyone said so. Manas boasted to
me that it had been six years since he had seen
a paved road. The police, the political officers,
the paramilitaries, the Adivasi tribes, the poorest
local farmers, and the Naxalites themselves: It
was the one thing they agreed upon.
There always came a point out there in those
jungles of India’s infamous Red Corridor—
Government informers
were tried in people’s
courts and killed with
axes or knives.
foremost among them in the states of Chhat-
tisgarh and Jharkhand—where the road began
to give up the struggle against the thrust of veg-
etation, against the rain and the heat, where the
last heavily fortified police station marked the
farthest reach of central and state authority in a
heave of tangled razor wire and bunkers. Then
it stopped.
After the end of the road? Then you were into
another world, undeveloped India, Naxalite ter-
ritory: a land of parallel authority, communism,
people’s courts, armed cadres, and IEDs.
The Naxalites took their name from Naxalbari,
a village in West Bengal where in May  an
abortive peasant uprising against landowners
took place and a police inspector died in a hail of
arrows. The bloodshed christened an amorphous,
fragmented movement, loosely inspired by the
 national geo graphic • April 
Maoist model of agrarian revolution. From then
on, Maoist militants were known as Naxalites.
Their sanctuary became the ,-square-
mile forest of Dandakaranya, which loosely
translates from Sanskrit as Jungle of Punish-
ment. Straddling parts of several states, in-
cluding Chhattisgarh and Andhra Pradesh,
Dandakaranya afforded the Naxalites a citadel
of sorts: Abujmarh, a jungle within a jungle,
one of the last of India’s uncharted territories.
Beneath the area’s dense canopy of vegetation,
rugged hills and valleys are bisected by streams
that rage as torrents during the rainy season,
forbidding terrain for any unwelcome stranger.
Death came in many ways in that jungle. The
Naxalites killed police and paramilitaries with
roadside bombs and ambushes. The police killed
the Naxalites in “encounters,” the vernacular en-
compassing both firefights and targeted killings.
Suspected government informers were tried in
people’s courts and killed with axes or knives,
leading to a surge in the homicide rate not re-
flected in the conflict’s official casualty count of
more than , dead across two decades.
The first Maoists, middle-class communist
radicals from the state of Andhra Pradesh, ar-
rived in Abujmarh in , fleeing a crackdown
by local authorities. The movement might have
died out altogether then, its ideology wither-
ing in the sweaty heat. Yet Abujmarh proved an
elixir to the Maoist revolutionaries. Here in the
depths of the jungle, they found a natural new
constituency among the Adivasi tribes.
The term Adivasi means “aboriginal” or
“original settler” in Sanskrit, and the Adivasis
are officially classified as members of Scheduled
Tribes, defined by the Indian Constitution as
indigenous groups given some form of recogni-
tion under national legislation. They number 
million—. percent of India’s population—and
are concentrated most heavily in and around
Dandakaranya.
It would be simplistic to describe the Nax-
alite movement as solely Adivasi. Its organiza-
tion’s cadres include not just members of India’s
Scheduled Tribes but also middle-class students,
as well as Dalits—the so-called Untouchables of
 CH
INA

NE
New Delhi PA
L
INDIA

Naksalbari
AREA (Naxalbari)
ENLARGED

Patna
Varanasi

Area with significant insurgent

violence or presence

Coalfields y
Valle
pura
JH Karan Bokaro
Site of major AR
Maoist attack KH Ranchi
State boundary AN
D
0 mi 75

0 km 75
Kolkata
(Calcutta)
RH

I N D I A
GA
TIS

Raipur
AT

Nagpur
CHH

Bhubaneshwar
Kanker

rh ranya
ma Dandaka
uj
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CORRIDOR OF CONFLICT
Maoist militants are entrenched in some of India’s
most impoverished yet mineral-rich states. From
their jungle strongholds, the fighters recruit from
disenfranchised Adivasi tribes and extort cash
from mining companies, obstructing development
even as other parts of India modernize.

RYAN MORRIS, NGM STAFF

SOURCES: GOVERNMENT OF INDIA MINISTRY OF HOME AFFAIRS;
INSTITUTE FOR CONFLICT MANAGEMENT; USGS; ESRI

Bangalore Chennai
(Bengaluru) (Madras)
Policemen in Chhattisgarh are put
through a grueling commando course
at the Counter Terrorism and Jungle
Warfare College, in Kanker.
the lowest caste—and a large number of fighters
from the country’s socially disadvantaged, de-
scribed in the constitution as Backward Classes.
Unworldly and vulnerable, the Adivasis in
Abujmarh proved natural hosts to the fugitives
among them, and after years of exposure to
Maoist ideology, many became Naxalite recruits.
It was hardly surprising in a nation where
nearly  million people survived on less than
two dollars a day—and where a round of drinks
among the urban elite in a Delhi bar could ex-
ceed a farmer’s monthly wages several times
over—that militant communism would thrive
in neglected areas beyond the writ of local au-
thority. The glitz and glamour of central business
districts were a universe away from vast, impov-
erished tracts of rural India.
What made the Naxalite insurgency so pecu-
liarly ironic, however, and gave it such an impact
Fighters from a
on the country’s future was that its epicenter was Maoist splinter group,
in the very heart of India’s immense mineral the TPC, patrol a
wealth. This is the natural inheritance so central village in Jharkhand,
to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s strategy to looking for former
regenerate India’s moribund economy and pro- allies. Feuds and
extortion rackets
vide electricity to the one-third of the country’s have fragmented
households—some  million people—that the Naxalites during
still live in the dark. the insurgency.
It was no coincidence that the cockpit of the
war was in Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh. Those
states are among the country’s richest in terms Rather than reduce the imbalance between
of mineral wealth, containing more than  per- rich and poor, mineral wealth has exacerbated
cent of India’s coal reserves. Their subterranean the divide, adding pollution, violence, and dis-
treasure trove also includes trillions of dollars’ placement to the daily struggle of those whose
worth of iron ore, limestone, dolomite, and livelihood is locked up in the land. The Karan-
bauxite reserves. The coal fuels the power plants pura Valley of northern Jharkhand epitomizes
that light up India’s distant metropolises. The the situation. Once famous for its tigers and a
steel makes the modern buildings, the gleam- major migration route of elephants, the area
ing tech complexes, the vehicles and engineering today is home to open coal pits, where massive
projects so integral to Modi’s vision. quantities of the carbon rock are mined. Origi-
Yet these two states have the worst record of nally mapped in the s, coalfields there were
Naxalite violence and some of the worst poverty acquired by Central Coalfields Limited (CCL), a
rates in India. In  one multidimensional anal- local subsidiary of state-owned Coal India Lim-
ysis of poverty, drawn up with support from the ited (CIL), in the mid-s.
United Nations Development Programme, said Across the decades, CCL had offered all sorts
that eight Indian states, including Jharkhand and of compensation to the locals—jobs, money, re-
Chhattisgarh, accounted for more poor people settlement, alternative housing—in return for
than the  poorest African nations combined. their land and their departure. Many accepted
 national geo graphic • April 
payment, gave up their land, and left. For others,
farming people whose sense of soul and liveli-
hood was inextricably linked to the soil, the lure
of money held little attraction. Pockets of them
hung on, as their dust-covered houses crumbled
and cracked around them with the shock waves
of pit blasting hammering up through the soles
of their feet and smearing the horizon with a
haze of smoke.
The Naxalites were already long established
in the area, feeding off the sense of division and
abandonment. A month before my first visit
there, a large group of armed Maoists had at-
tacked the valley’s Ashoka mine, burning dump
trucks and company jeeps before being driven
off in a running gun battle with local police.
“Our land is everything to us,” explained a
young local activist in the village of Henjda,
as another pit blast rent the air. “Seventy-five
percent of our village are refusing to give
up their land to CCL. They offer us money as
compensation. They offer us jobs in the coal-
fields: one job for every two acres of land. But
none of it is enough. Money goes. Jobs end.
Besides, some families have nine people de-
pending on ten acres of farmland. So we aren’t
moving.”
As in so many other rural coal-mining areas,
local communities have been divided between
those clinging to their homes and resisting
the encroachment of the mines and those
who signed on as land agents for CCL, tasked
with persuading other people to sell their
land. It was easy for the Maoists to exploit the
situation. Fights already had broken out be-
tween the split communities, and the graffiti
India’s Insurgency 
on the cracked walls boded further ill.
“Agents of CCL, take our land and give your
heads to us,” one ominous threat read. Many
moved just to escape the poisoned relation-
ships within their villages. When I went back
to Jharkhand two years later and asked about
the young activist I’d met, I learned that he had
abandoned his activism, worn out by death
threats and police harassment. His friends said
that he had a new job too—with CCL.
The Maoists were no slouches at exploiting
minerals either. As my travels lengthened
through Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand, one thing
became clear: Mining and mineral exploitation
“We’re not the enemy of
mining,” Comrade Ranjit
said, smiling. “It can be
our friend.”
had antagonized the Adivasis and the dis-
advantaged rural poor, making them aware
of being the have-nots in a land of potential
have-a-lots. But the Naxalites did nothing to
oppose mineral exploitation. They thrived on it.
Comrade Manas had never tried to duck the
subject when I quizzed him on Naxalite mining
policy. He told me that most Maoist units, on
hearing that mineral surveys were taking place,
far from seeking to attack and drive off min-
ing companies in defense of local land rights,
asked a simple question: “What will be paid to
the party as taxes?”
Revenue was critical to the Naxalites’ sur-
vival. Like any insurgency, theirs needed funds,
and the potential levy on mining—alongside
the protection rackets, kickbacks, and access
to industrial explosives that came with it—far
 national geo graphic • April 
exceeded anything the Maoists’ annual tax on
tendu leaves (used since the th century to roll
cigarettes) or rice could come up with. When
mines were attacked, it was often only because
their owners had not paid the protection money
or had held back giving the Naxalites a cut of
the profits.
“In many parts of India today, Maoism is not
ideology driven but levy driven,” warned Jairam
Ramesh, India’s minister for rural affairs before
his National Congress party (INC) government
fell to Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in the
 elections. Ramesh was so concerned about
the symbiosis between the Naxalites and the
mining industry that he had publicly demanded
a moratorium on all mining in the areas worst
affected by the insurgents.
“Where there is mining, there is Maoism,
because where there is mining, there is more
revenue, and where there is more revenue, there
is more extortion,” he added. “Some of the best-
known names in Indian industry are running
businesses in the Maoist areas by paying off the
Maoists. I don’t want to name names, but these
are the biggest names in Indian industry.”
I was allowed a glimpse of the operation first-
hand one October day in Jharkhand. A series of
coded calls led to a meeting with a stranger in
a rural marketplace. In turn, he guided me to
a deserted stretch of track beside the jungle—
the rendezvous point for a Naxalite command-
er, alias Comrade Ranjit, who in addition to
his many other tasks oversaw an insurgent-
controlled coking plant.
The plant lay in open fields beside the jungle
just a few miles from Jharkhand’s thermal power
station at Bokaro, built in .
The coking operation he next showed me
was entirely professional—and entirely Naxalite
run. The plant had been built without a license
and relied on local coal mined illegally by local
villagers, who chipped away in a multitude of
nearby mines. The Naxalites protected the site
and made money from it. The police took a cut
of the profits too, or so Comrade Ranjit insisted
as we walked around the plant. He claimed that
the Naxalites paid officials a hundred thousand
rupees (about $,) a month to stay away
from the site. He also explained a simple system
of bribery involving corrupt officials who were
paid a fee to issue documents legitimizing each
-ton truckload of Naxalite coke so that it could
flow into the legal convoy chain. For their part,
the Naxalites took the equivalent of a thousand
dollars a day in levies from the operation.
“We’re not the enemy of mining,” Comrade
Ranjit said, smiling, puzzled at my frown of dim
comprehension. “It can be our friend.”
Multiply the figure of a thousand dollars a day
across the thousands of illegal coking plants and
coal mines that lie within Naxalite areas. Add to
it what top-ranking mining companies pay the
Maoists each year for protection—an amount
described conservatively by Jairam Ramesh as
“millions and millions” of dollars. Mix into that
equation known mineral reserves, the hungers
of globalized industry, social grievances, and
the schisms in a developing society caused by
ill-distributed coal-boom profits, and the Nax-
alites stop looking like museum-piece ideo-
logical artifacts and start looking more like an
immensely well funded and complex insurgency
that links European economies with a roadside
IED planted for a police vehicle approaching an
Adivasi village in Chhattisgarh. They look like
a phenomenon of the globalized present rather
than the Maoist past.
If the jungle gave the Naxalites sanctuary and
mineral wealth gave them money, it was land
acquisition and displacement that gave them a
well of recruits and formed the forefront of the
government’s response to the insurgency.
Ever since it became law in , the Land
Acquisition Act—an archaic piece of colonial
legislation created expressly to allow the gov-
ernment to seize land for public purpose under
the principle of eminent domain—had been
the source of bitter contention throughout In-
dia. It had displaced millions of people from
their homes for mining and hydroelectricity,
road and rail projects. By the time the act was
overhauled in  to include meaningful repa-
ration and rehabilitation clauses for the dispos-
sessed, the damage had been done. In the years
since India’s independence alone, the right of
eminent domain had been used to displace an
estimated  million Indians, including about
 million Adivasis.
The hardship has been especially severe
for the Adivasis, many of whom have not
been properly resettled. Given that  per-
cent of India’s coal, more than  percent of
mineral reserves, and most of the desirable
hydropower dam sites are in Adivasi areas, land
acquisition has thus become the de facto fault
line between the needs of traditional hunter-
gatherer societies and the requirements of a
rapidly industrializing economy with a raven-
ous appetite for better infrastructure.
Yet today, even the new act of  is in dif-
ficulties. Originally drafted by Ramesh and
passed by the outgoing INC administration, it
established a benchmark of compensation and
resettlement among the displaced, intending to
pull the teeth of their anger and undermine the
Naxalites. Yet under pressure from industry and
mining interests, Modi’s BJP government is al-
ready eyeing the act as the target of possible revi-
sion, and land rights seem set to remain a source
of anger and dispute for the indefinite future.
However much they drew strength from legiti-
mate social grievance, there was still no doubt-
ing the terror the Naxalites could inspire. The
brutality of their war revealed itself one spring
morning in Chhattisgarh. I had driven deep into
the south of the state near the town of Bijapur,
following up on a vague police report about a
Maoist attack on an Adivasi village. Stopping
in Kutru, a village in the foothills of Abujmarh,
I stared out into the press of jungle toward the
point where the road, already not much more
than a rutted track, finally thinned and divided,
petering out into a half dozen trails before van-
ishing into a kaleidoscope of smashing green.
It may have looked beautiful from the out-
side, but few Adivasi adults in that forest had a
balanced diet, and malnutrition was rife among
their children. Anemia and pulmonary tuber-
culosis were common, and in the more remote
areas, infant mortality could take three out of five
India’s Insurgency 
Nine-year-old Malti Telam, whose
father was killed in the violence, combs
a friend’s hair at an orphanage in Kutru,
Chhattisgarh. Every child here has lost
at least one parent to the insurgency.
children. Almost every statistic about the Adi-
vasis placed them at the bottom of India’s social
scale. They had the lowest life expectancy and
literacy rate. Seventy-five percent lived below
the official poverty line. Every year, monsoons
brought death to thousands, from diseases such
as gastroenteritis and malaria. Polio and blind-
ness rates were high. The potential benefits of
development and a fair distribution of mineral
wealth should have brought immense improve-
ments to the quality of life—had they not been
so catastrophically mismanaged.
Put aside the Adivasis’ sense of inequality,
even abandonment, by the state, and it was
clear that few of them wanted their traditional
hunter-gatherer life, an existence without an
alphabet, schools, electricity, roads, in which
many babies and mothers died in childbirth
 national geo graphic • April 
and the village shaman treated every affliction,
from cerebral malaria to cholera. The Naxalites
offered them no better alternative, only a hazy
notion of protection and an archaic ideology
long abandoned by the rest of the world.
As I looked at that green landscape in the warm
early morning, it seemed impossible to imagine
what harm lay ahead. Neither a whisper of man
nor a hint of malice came from those crowded
trees, the jostle of mahua leaves, tamarind, and
kusum. Instead the air vibrated gently with the
thrum of insects and the hoots of unseen birds.
Then, from among the low tribal huts on one
side of the road’s end, the sound of a woman’s
weeping rent the stillness. Her sobbing lasted
barely a minute, yet it carried an inconsolable
grief. The Adivasis I encountered were supremely
self-possessed and enduring, and it was rare to

Adivasi bride
Rani Kumari—her
head daubed with
turmeric paste
for purification and
good fortune—is
15 years old. In
Jharkhand nearly
two-thirds of girls are
married by age 18.
see them express any such extreme emotion.
The village men brought her over to me. Sarita
was her name. Her face was waxen with sadness
and shock, but she was proud and stared me di-
rectly in the face when she spoke. She was just
, an Adivasi girl from the Maria tribe. She wore
a light tribal dress and carried herself with the
same straight-backed, sure-footed poise I always
saw in the Adivasi villages.
She had arrived in Kutru the previous night
along with  others, most of them extended
family members. They lived in Kerpe, a village
deeper in the jungle, but had fled their home as
fugitives from a Maoist ultimatum. The Nax-
alites had emerged from the jungle and occupied
their village the previous week, Sarita told me,
cutting it off from the outside world. She said
there were more than a hundred fighters in all,
men and women dressed in olive fatigues and
heavily armed, and that they were commanded
by a large woman known as Ranjita.
The Naxalite armed cadres usually appeared
in the area in April, emerging from Abujmarh
and traveling from village to village along the
jungle fringes extracting a levy from the tribes
on the sale of their tendu leaves. On this occa-
sion, though, the Maoists had more than levy on
their minds. Sarita’s relatives had made a fateful
mistake. An educated family, three months ear-
lier they had collected signatures from locals as
part of a petition to the state authorities request-
ing that a police station be established in Kerpe.
The attendant benefits of a police presence in the
village included a road.
The militants seized Sarita’s father, her broth-
er, and a cousin from their home. Next Ranjita
and her cadres summoned the village to witness
a Jan Adalat, today’s incarnation of the infamous
People’s Courts established by Mao in the s
as a way for Chinese peasants to put landlords
on trial.
First Ranjita read out the charges against
Sarita’s family. Next three alleged government
collaborators, bound and blindfolded, were
beaten with clubs and fists before the silent
crowd. “Then it suddenly finished,” Sarita said.
“Ranjita addressed us one last time. She told the
village that anyone with relatives in the police
or local government had one week to leave their
homes or be killed. Then she walked up to me
and said I would find my father and brother
‘sleeping’ on the path home. The Naxalites made
us chant Maoist slogans a few times, and then
they disappeared.”
Sarita did find her father and brother on the
trail home. They lay beside her abducted cousin.
The men’s hands were tied, and they had been
beaten to death with the flat edge of axheads. Her
brother’s eyelids had been cut away with a knife.
I left her standing at a point near where the
jungle fell upon the edge of the village. She had
stopped crying by then and looked about with the
cool, practical regard of a newly anointed refu-
gee assessing the rules of necessity, weighing the
prospects of life on each side of the road’s end. j
India’s Insurgency 
 SOUTH DAKOTA

Mountain pine beetles

are ravaging western
forests, including those
around Mount Rush-
more. Gray pines are
dead and bare; rust-
colored trees died more
recently and still cling to
their needles. A quarter
of Black Hills forests
have been affected. Will
the beetles spread
across the continent?


 The
Bug
That’s
Eating
The
A warming
climate allowed
pine beetles to
Woods
ravage the West.
Now they’re
spreading east
across Canada.
 ALBERTA, CANADA

Since 2004 foresters in

Alberta have cut more
than a million infested
trees, hoping to slow
the beetle’s eastward
march. Most felled trees
are burned, like these
near Grande Prairie.

MONTANA

On a ranch near Seeley

Lake (left), a worker
sprays a ponderosa
pine with insecticide
to fend off beetles. But
spraying whole forests
every year would be too
costly and polluting.
By Hillary Rosner
Photographs by Peter Essick
O ne chilly morning in
October 2013, Diana
Six parked her white Subaru at the edge of a pine
forest in southwestern Montana’s Big Hole Val-
ley. Beneath snow-tipped peaks, lodgepole pines
in four different colors draped the hillside—a
time line of carnage. The gray ones, now just
trunks and branches, had died in 2009. Light red
trees, still holding needles, had succumbed in
2011. Darker, auburn trees had perished in 2012.
Even the seemingly healthy green trees, said Six,
a ponytailed, bodybuilding, beer-brewing ento-
mologist at the University of Montana, were not
what they seemed. Roughly a quarter of them
were already doomed.
Six zipped her jacket and ambled into the
woods with an ax. She stopped at a mixed stand
of emerald and burnt-orange lodgepoles. With
the ax blade, she gently peeled a strip of bark
from a green tree, exposing the pale wood be-
neath. There, wedged into narrow channels
carved into the wood, were tiny black larvae
the size of sesame seeds. They were dead, done
in by an early hard frost—but it had come too
late to save the lodgepole. Though the tree ap-
peared to be thriving, its phloem, the fibrous
layer under the bark that transports nutrients,
was dry and brown.
Six moved to the next tree, another seemingly
healthy one. Its phloem was greenish pink and
pliant, clearly still hydrated. But it was laced with
 national geo graphic • April 
the same telltale channels. From their size and
the lack of larvae, Six concluded that this tree
had been invaded as recently as a week earlier.
As she peeled back the bark with her ax, she ac-
cidentally squished a small black beetle.
Across western North America, in millions of
acres of pine forest, the story is the same. Drive
through parts of Colorado, and you’ll encounter
entire mountainsides painted with rust. From
valley bottoms all the way to the tree line, nearly
every single pine has been killed by an enemy
smaller than a thumbtack: the mountain pine
beetle. Tour British Columbia, and the scale of
destruction is even more appalling. More than
44 million acres of pine trees there, an area the
size of Missouri, have been attacked to varying
degrees over the past 15 years.
Nature is always changing. But the mountain
pine beetle is a troubling omen. It shows that
global warming can push even native species to
go rogue. At some point the epidemic will run
its course, leaving a wake of ghost forests and
altered ecosystems. “We need to see this as a har-
binger of what’s to come,” Six says. “We’re going
to see one ecosystem after another begin to tip.”
Unlike other organisms that have been rav-
aging the American landscape—Asian carp,
kudzu—the mountain pine beetle isn’t an im-
migrant. It’s native to western pine forests,
especially lodgepole and ponderosa forests,
 To learn how far pine beetles can fly, Maya Evenden of the University of Alberta
ALBERTA
tethers them to a “flight mill” and flies them in circles. Their average distance in
her lab: one to four miles, depending on their age. The record: 15 miles.

where it normally lives in relatively small num-
bers, killing a tree or two here and there. It’s
been normal too for the beetle’s population to
boom every now and then, and for it to kill large
swaths of forest. But mainly in a single region—
not across half a continent.
The scale of the current epidemic is unprec-
edented. Since the 1990s more than 60 million
acres of forest, from northern New Mexico
through British Columbia, have suffered die-offs.
By the time the outbreak in British Columbia pe-
ters out, some 60 percent of the mature pines in
the province may be dead. That’s a billion cubic
meters of wood.
The trees aren’t the only casualties. A forest
die-off disrupts everything, from food webs to
local economies. In British Columbia timber-
mill towns are cash-strapped; in Yellowstone
National Park bears and birds have lost a rich
source of nutrition. Falling trees have closed
campgrounds, crushed cars, and sparked wild-
fires by toppling power lines. Formerly secluded
forest homes now have views of the neighbors.
With nothing to anchor it, soil washes away.
For its current good fortune, the mountain
pine beetle can thank us. To start with, we’ve
spent the past century eliminating forest fires—
thereby turning the woods into beetle buffets.
When the crisis began, British Columbia’s forests
were packed with three times as many mature
pines as there would have been had they been
allowed to burn naturally. Like mountain pine
beetles, fire is native to western forests, and it’s
as important as rain to their health. It nourishes
soil, spreads seeds, creates openings for sunlight,
ensures habitat for all sorts of creatures.
According to Allan Carroll, an insect ecolo-
gist at the University of British Columbia who
has been studying the beetles since he was an
undergraduate in the late 1980s, only 17 percent
Hillary Rosner teaches journalism at Syracuse
University; this is her first feature for the magazine.
Photographer Peter Essick’s first appeared in 1986.

Pi ne Beetl es 
 PINE BEETLE, ACTUAL SIZE

Death by a Thousand Bites

For centuries the relationship was mutually beneficial: Pine beetles
culled older, weaker trees, producing new beetles but also a healthier
forest. Climate change, with its warmer, drier conditions, has upset
that balance, leaving even healthy trees vulnerable to attack.

FIRST WEEK
Selection and Invasion The tree tries to
suffocate the
The cycle begins in summer, insects by
when a lone female beetle bores secreting resin
into a tree’s bark and releases into the beetles’
a pheromone that attracts boreholes.
hundreds of other beetles.

SECOND WEEK
Burrowing and Egg Laying
Sixty to eighty
Beetles dig galleries under the eggs are laid in
bark, depositing eggs and blue each gallery.
fungi to feed the next generation.
Phloem layer
The galleries block nutrient flow
in the tree’s phloem layer.

THIRD WEEK TO 4 MONTHS

Hatching and Feeding
Larvae hatch and chew
side galleries, feeding on
the phloem and the fungi. The larvae
develop cold
resistance in
The tree remains green for time for winter.
months after beetles have
fatally mauled it.

5 TO 12 MONTHS
Overwintering and Dispersal
The beetle larvae lie dormant until
spring, when they’ll turn into pupae, Pupal stage
then adults. The new brood feeds
on fungal spores before dispersing
to another tree.

Needles turn yellow in Fungi-carrying

the dry heat of summer. new adult

13 TO 24 MONTHS
Red Means Dead
The beetles are long gone, and
the drying tree turns red. Finally
JOHN TOMANIO, NGM STAFF;
it loses most of its needles and SHELLEY SPERRY
ART: SAMANTHA WELKER
becomes gray.
SOURCE: DIANA SIX,
UNIVERSITY OF MONTANA
of British Columbia’s lodgepole pine forests were
ripe for a beetle attack a century ago. By the
mid-1990s that number had risen to more than
50 percent. Yet even that epic surge in vulner-
able mature trees wouldn’t by itself have killed
whole mountainsides across ten states and two
Canadian provinces. That vulnerability intensi-
fied the epidemic—but a change in climate was
required to kick it off. The beetle has us to thank
too for warming the whole planet with our car-
bon dioxide emissions.
Rising temperatures and drought have stressed
trees, leaving them unable to fight an invasion.
Warmer weather also has boosted the beetles’
population and greatly expanded their range.
They’re flourishing farther north and at higher
elevations, invading pine trees, such as jack pine
and whitebark, that had rarely seen them until a
few years ago. Because these trees aren’t as good
at defending themselves, a smaller band of bee-
tles can overwhelm them. Three-quarters of the
mature whitebark pines in Yellowstone Nation-
al Park are now dead—a blow to grizzly bears,
which eat the seeds in autumn, and to Clark’s
nutcrackers, which cache the seeds for winter.
In 2008 Carroll and other researchers pro-
duced a report for the Canadian government,
concluding that the risk of the mountain pine
beetle infesting jack pines in the boreal forest—
which stretches right across Canada, covering
a quarter of the country—was small but sig-
nificant. But the beetle is already in jack pines.
It has now colonized Alberta all the way east
to Saskatchewan and north to the Yukon and
Northwest Territories. Unlike lodgepoles, jack
pines live as far east as Nova Scotia and down
into the upper Midwest and New England.
“Will the beetle move across the continent?”
asks Carroll. Colleagues call him Dr. Doom—if
he’s meeting with your local officials, it’s a good
sign your forests are toast. He answers his own
question: “Yes.”
Atop Carroll’s desk at the University of Brit-
ish Columbia in Vancouver, a motorcycle helmet
and jacket sit at the ready for his semiweekly
commute home to Vancouver Island—a trip
that takes several hours and winds past thriving
forests of Douglas firs. Carroll often takes back
roads to spend more time amid robust trees.
Under his desk is a white bucket containing
a lodgepole pine log. Inside the log a female
mountain pine beetle—Carroll calls her his of-
fice mate—has laid her eggs.
Carroll’s office mate is a Dendroctonus pon-
derosae, one of about 6,000 species of bark
beetles, including 500 that live in the U.S. and
Canada. Most bark beetles lay eggs under the
bark of trees that are already dead or dying. Only
a few species burrow into healthy trees, and of
those, most go in as a lone pair, posing no threat.
Even the few species that do kill trees tend to
target highly stressed ones. The mountain pine
beetle is the bad bug of the bunch. Given the
right conditions, it can ravage one healthy tree
after another.
When a female mountain pine beetle like the
one in the bucket lands on a tree, she first has
to decide whether it’s a decent place to raise a
family. To do this, she’ll chew into the bark and
taste the chemicals. If the tree meets her stan-
dards, she’ll continue burrowing, severing ducts
that contain resin—the tree’s first line of defense.
Ideally for the tree, the resin will simply flush
the beetle out.
But evolution is all about one-upmanship.
And in a particularly elegant flourish, the beetle
has evolved to ingest the resin—if she can sur-
vive swimming through the syrupy river—and
convert it into a pheromone, a chemical that
sends a message to other beetles. By releasing
this pheromone into the air, the beetle signals
that she’s found a great place to congregate.
Other beetles, male and female, gather. If there
are enough of them, a mass assault ensues.
The tree doesn’t give up easily. As soon as the
burrowing beetles reach living cells, the cells
commit suicide. As they die, they rupture, re-
leasing a substance that’s supertoxic and beetle
annihilating. If there aren’t a lot of beetles, says
Carroll, “generally the tree wins.” But if the bee-
tles invade with an army, not just a few scraggly
mercenaries, they overwhelm the tree. Depend-
ing on the tree’s condition, it can take many
Pi ne Beetl es 
COLORADO

Spruce beetles and

fire have killed
almost every tree
near Wolf Creek
Pass. The pine beetle
epidemic has peaked
in Colorado, but
attacks by spruce
beetles—which also
burrow through bark—
are still on the rise.
Chronology of
an Epidemic
Historically the mountain pine beetle’s primary host has been lodgepole pine. In the north,
where lodgepoles dominate the landscape, cold temperatures helped keep beetle popula-
tions in check; down south the insects had far fewer trees to infest. With forests increasingly
warmed by climate change, the beetles are thriving in once inhospitable areas, attacking
species of pine they rarely touched before—and drastically altering the landscape.

BRITISH B.C.
COLUMBIA ALBERTA ALBERTA
Grande
Prairie
R

Edmonton
O

Chilcotin
C

Plateau
K
Y

Vancouver Cypress Hills Vancouver

Seattle
Seattle
M

MONT. MONT.
WASH. WASH.
O
U

S. DAK. S. DAK.
N

OREG. OREG.
T A

IDAHO WYO. IDAHO WYO.

I N

NEV. NEV.
UTAH
S

UTAH
San Francisco COLO. COLO.

CALIF. CALIF.

ARIZ. ARIZ.

1990-1996
THE BEETLE AND ITS HOSTS Prelude to Disaster
Mountain pine beetle occurrence A potential epidemic in the mid-
1980s was averted by two particu-
Lodgepole pine range
larly cold winters in a row. But by
Jack pine range the mid-1990s a combination of
Other pine species forestry policies, warmer winters,
and dry summers had helped beetle
numbers rise dramatically. Infesta-
0 mi 400 tions erupted in pockets across
0 km 400 drought-stricken British Columbia,
Washington, and Oregon, sowing
the seeds of an epidemic.
1997-2006
The Epidemic Begins
Beetle populations swelled to
unprecedented numbers as their
range expanded north and east.
By 2006 beetles had crossed the
Canadian Rockies and were in the
area around Grande Prairie, Alberta.
By 2007 the epidemic in British
Columbia was slowing, as the
beetles ran out of trees to attack.
But from Montana to Colorado it
was nearing its peak.
 YUKON

NORTHWEST Northern Alberta, where jack and

TERRITORIES lodgepole pines both thrive, is
now the front line in the beetle
battle. Alberta’s aggressive cutting
and burning of trees may slow the
beetle’s eastward spread.
B.C.
ALBERTA SASK. MANITOBA
Bo
re ONTARIO
al
Edmonton For
est
CANADA
Vancouver Ottawa
Seattle Seeley
WASH. Lake
Missoula MONT.
OREG. YELLOWSTONE S. DAK.
Yankee NATIONAL Black MT. RUSHMORE
PARK NATIONAL MEMORIAL Washington, D.C.
Fork H ill s
Salmon IDAHO Custer
River
WYO. NEBR.

NEV.
San Francisco UTAH
COLO. UNITED STATES
Wolf Creek Pass
Los Alamos
CALIF. BANDELIER
NATIONAL MONUMENT
ARIZ.
N. MEX.
Southernmost
occurrence of
lodgepole pine
Ba
ja

Few species of pine are immune

Ca

to the mountain pine beetle.

lif

MEXICO Some scientists fear that winds or

or

infested wood might even spread

ni

it to the white, loblolly, and

a

2007-2013
longleaf pines of the Southeast.
Into the Jack Pine
The beetles advanced into
formerly inhospitable zones,
where winter temperatures are no
longer reliably cold enough to kill
them. They also colonized jack
pines, a species found across
Canada’s boreal forest. If the
beetles can sustain a population
there, they could eventually spread
east across the country and down
into the Midwest and New England.
MARTIN GAMACHE, NGM STAFF; SHELLEY SPERRY
SOURCES: CANADIAN FOREST SERVICE; BARBARA BENTZ AND JEANINE PASCHKE, U.S. FOREST
SERVICE; AARON MCGILL, ALBERTA ENVIRONMENT AND SUSTAINABLE RESOURCE
DEVELOPMENT; TIM EBATA, BRITISH COLUMBIA MFLNRO; ALLAN CARROLL, UNIVERSITY OF
BRITISH COLUMBIA; BRIAN AUKEMA, UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA
thousands or just a few hundred beetles to kill it.
The drought and warmer temperatures that
have struck western forests in recent years have
helped the beetles in two ways: by stressing the
trees so much that they succumb more readily
and by giving the beetles more time to attack
them. Beetles in Montana, says Six, used to fly
from one tree to another mainly during two
weeks in July. But now, as that infested tree in
the Big Hole Valley shows, the flying season lasts
into October. That means the beetles have ad-
ditional time to reproduce—even as the extreme
cold snaps of fall and spring, which helped keep
populations in check, have become rare.
There’s an eerie wisdom in a beetle mob.
Sparsely distributed beetles besiege small trees;
denser groups go for larger quarry. They seem
to attack a large tree only when they know there
are enough of them to take it. How does the first
beetle know? Carroll and his graduate student
Jordan Burke suspect it’s the pheromone. A bur-
rowing beetle releases it to call for help, but the
amount that’s in the air already tells her whether
help is available and it’s safe to lay her eggs. The
beetle in Carroll’s office is part of an experiment
testing that hypothesis.
In any case, the cycle feeds on itself. The big-
ger the tree, the more beetle babies a beetle mom
produces. More beetles mean more mass attacks
on bigger, healthier trees. Once there are enough
beetles to blast large trees, large swaths of forest
are essentially doomed.
In  scientists at the University of British
Columbia sequenced the mountain pine beetle’s
genome, making it only the second of more than
400,000 beetle species to bear that distinction.
(The first was the red flour beetle, which infests
stored grains.) But Joerg Bohlmann, the plant
biochemist who oversaw the sequencing effort,
doesn’t think a biotechnical fix to the pine beetle
epidemic is imminent.
“We have to be extremely careful we don’t
promise things that are not realistic,” he says.
Pesticides can save a few individual trees but not
a forest; they’re too expensive, and they’d kill all
sorts of other organisms. Breeding beetle-resistant
 national geo graphic • April 
trees would take decades, even with modern ge-
netics. And even then the beetles might rapidly
adapt and break through the resistance.
For the moment most research, from the ge-
nome work to the beetle in Carroll’s bucket, is
aimed at simply improving our ability to predict
insect outbreaks. “No one can give you a certain
answer about where the bark beetle will be in
five years,” says Bohlmann. “That is the biggest
issue.” If you can get to a forest soon enough,
when beetle populations are still relatively
small, you may control the infestation. At least
that’s the theory that’s being tested in Alberta,
which has become the front line in the battle
To save a forest, you
have to cut a lot of trees—
to ensure the beetles
have nowhere else to go.
to stop the beetle’s march across the continent.
In many parts of British Columbia and the
western United States the infestation is slowing
on its own—in some places because there aren’t
many trees left to kill. But in Alberta it began
more recently. Alberta has about 15 million
acres of pines, far fewer than British Colum-
bia, but they’re in vitally important areas, at the
sources of mountain rivers that feed the prairies
and cities below. If those forests are devastated,
the unshaded snow will melt faster, and rivers
will crest earlier—before the dry season, when
people and ecosystems need the water most.
To save a forest, you have to cut a lot of trees;
the only way to stall the beetles is to ensure that
they have nowhere else to go. Alberta’s long-
term strategy is to log or burn most patches of
forest that are dominated by mature pine trees
and thus highly susceptible to the beetles. Its
short-term strategy is to fight the beetle tree by
tree. In the past decade it has spent more than
$320 million (U.S.) on beetle management.
 A chinook salmon spawns in the Yankee Fork of the Salmon River, where dead
IDAHO
lodgepole pines line the banks. The trees are vital to the threatened salmon:
By slowing snowmelt, they keep streams cool into spring and limit excess silt.

The aim, says Erica Samis, a senior forest
manager at Alberta’s Ministry of Environment
and Sustainable Resource Development, is to
limit the beetle’s spread along the eastern front
of the Rocky Mountains and east into the boreal
forest. Foresters hand-fell any cluster of three or
more trees that are green but actively infested—
sometimes a whole stand—if there are enough
vulnerable trees within three miles. They burn
or chip the trees to kill the beetles. In the area
around Grande Prairie, where the beetles had
never been seen until winds carried them over
the Rockies in 2006, foresters have cut down
200,000 trees just since 2012.
Carroll likens beetle management to paying
down a large balance on a credit card. “What
you have to do is hit more of the beetle than
what is growing annually,” he says. “You’ve got to
get past the interest into the principal. But when
the population gets so big that you can’t even
get partway through the interest, you’re hosed.”
So far Alberta has managed, year by year, to
make a dent in the principal—at least in most
areas. Parts of the province have been designated
“holding zones,” where the government is just
trying to keep beetle numbers steady. Other
parts have been deemed a lost cause: There are
just too many beetles. If foresters can’t remove
at least 80 percent of infested trees, they figure,
there’s no point in doing anything. As Samis puts
it, “You’re peeing into the wind.”
What lies ahead in the battle for North
American forests? Alberta is burning its felled
dead trees in huge piles set alight during the
soggy weeks of early spring. If you were to slice
into one of those logs, you’d see a lovely blue
stain seeping through the yellow wood. It’s a
telltale sign of a tree that was killed by moun-
tain pine beetles, and it has generated a cottage
industry in siding, cabinets, and furniture made
with the blue-toned lumber. Throughout the
western U.S. you’ll find “beetle kill” pine adorn-
ing homes, stores, and restaurants. My house in
Pi ne Beetl es 
 WYOMING

A camera trap near

Yellowstone National
Park catches a grizzly
bear stealing whitebark
pine nuts from a
squirrel’s cache. The
nuts are an important
food for the bears, a
threatened species.
DREW RUSH
 A beetle effigy made with beetle-kill wood warms a joyful crowd at a winter
SOUTH DAKOTA
festival in Custer. “Dealing with the beetle is a running battle,” says forester Frank
Carroll. “It’s the one time of the year we get to feel we have the upper hand.”

Colorado has a ceiling built of beetle-kill planks.
In Missoula, Montana, Ryan Palma runs Sus-
tainable Lumber Company, which sells high-
end, handcrafted flooring, doors, and paneling
made from blue-stained ponderosa pines, many
100 to 400 years old. He harvests only trees that
have been dead at least two years, so that all the
beetles are gone, and he dries the wood slowly
in a large kiln that’s fueled by scrap beetle kill.
The stain “kicks the wood into a lower grade,”
says Palma, “so sawmills don’t want it.” But a
luxury market is growing, mostly out of state.
Musician Jack Johnson has a beetle-kill guitar;
Al Gore owns a blue-stained ukulele.
The blue hue is caused by a fungus, one of
two that the mountain pine beetle carts around
in a “fungal suitcase” in its exoskeleton. (The
beetles also carry yeasts, and for years Six used
one variety to home brew a beer she called Six-
Legged Ale.) When beetles bore into a tree, the
fungi slip out of the suitcases and grow alongside
the larvae, providing them with nitrogen-rich
 national geo graphic • April 
food. “The beetles can’t survive on the wood,”
says Six. “It’s pretty much junk food. The fungi
act like nutritional supplements, and that’s what
allows the beetles to do what they do.”
One of the two fungi thrives in cool tempera-
tures; the other likes things warm. Their popula-
tions in the beetles shift with temperature. Six’s
lab created models to see what might happen
to the fungi as the planet warms. “If we warm
things up a degree,” she says, “what appears to
be a very symbiotic, fine-tuned system begins
to fall apart.” Over the course of a century the
cool-loving fungus disappears.
That’s a small source of hope. The cool-loving
fungus is the superior source of nitrogen; it en-
ables the beetles to produce one-third more
offspring, which can make all the difference
to a forest. Six says the cool fungus is already
vanishing in warmer parts of Montana; in some
low-elevation ponderosa forests, less than one
percent of the beetles now carry it. Global
warming has been letting the beetle thrive—but
as it continues, it could cut the epidemic short.
Or maybe not. The genome work has shown
that mountain pine beetles are as genetically
variable as humans are. That genetic variability
is a source of adaptability; so is beetle behavior.
For whatever reason, beetles at the northern end
of the Rocky Mountains in Canada seem better
able to deal with cold temperatures than beetles
in the United States. No one really knows yet
how the species—or the forests themselves—will
respond to a warmer future.
In the Jemez Mountains of northern New
Mexico, a few miles west of Bandelier National
All over the world drought-
stressed forests are being
tipped toward death by rising
temperatures.
Monument, Craig Allen stands on an outcrop of
flat, craggy rocks and stares into Cochiti Can-
yon. The slanting autumn sun carves shadows
on the slopes. It’s a spectacular vista, except for
one thing: Virtually every tree in sight is dead.
A forest ecologist with the U.S. Geological
Survey, Allen has been based at Bandelier and
taking in this view for nearly 30 years, and his
heartbreak is palpable. Mountain pine beetles
weren’t a factor here—Bandelier is at the south-
ern end of their range—but other species of bark
beetle have killed many trees. So has a trio of
huge wildfires, the last in 2011. In all, about two-
thirds of the trees in Bandelier have died since
1996. Some forests vanished completely, killed
by one fire and consumed by the next, leaving
open meadows where thick stands of trees re-
cently stood.
What happened in the Jemez Mountains, Al-
len says, is an extreme example of an emerging
global phenomenon—what Diana Six calls tip-
ping ecosystems. In New Mexico, beetles and
fires tipped a system that was already stressed
by drought. And all over the world, as in New
Mexico, according to studies done by Allen and
other researchers, drought-stressed forests are
being tipped toward death by a global amplifier:
rising temperatures.
We tend to equate drought with a dearth of
rainfall. But warmer air can also reduce a tree’s
water supply, by pulling even more moisture
out of leaves and soil. The Jemez Mountains got
hit by both: a severe lack of rain compounded
by soaring temperatures. Allen calls this kind
of historically unprecedented combination of
drought and heat a global-change-type drought.
It has caused forest die-offs in other parts of the
world too, from southwest Australia to inner
Asia and from the Amazon to the Mediterra-
nean. The warmer future forecast by climate
models suggests the American Southwest in
particular is in for more of the same: Allen, Park
Williams of Columbia University, and their col-
leagues project that by 2050 the stress on south-
western forests will routinely be worse than in
the worst droughts of the past millennium.
For all the destruction wrought by pine bee-
tles, they may be simply messengers. Around
Bandelier these days the dead trees are falling
pretty much every day. Cautionary road signs
show one falling on a person. In much of the
area, Allen says, the trees won’t regrow; grasses
and shrubs are replacing them. Driving back
down into Los Alamos, he tries to conjure some
optimism. Elk love the new open meadows, he
points out.
“People always say things like, A thousand
acres were lost,” he says. “But they weren’t actu-
ally lost. The land is still there, full of new life
again. I personally lost friends in the fires—indi-
vidual ancient trees I knew and loved. But these
systems are in the process of adjusting. Nature
goes on.”
That’s no doubt a healthy attitude, but it’s not
an easy one to sustain. In Montana, Six too has
seen massive changes to landscapes she loves. At
the turnoff to a forest road not far from Butte
a sign says, “Keep Montana green.” Six laughs
mordantly. “Tell that to the beetles,” she says. j
Pi ne Beetl es 
Trajan, who ruled from A.D. 98 until 117,
when he fell ill and died, expanded the
Roman Empire to its farthest boundaries.
In this marble statue he wears armor
typically used in triumphal parades.
NY CARLSBERG GLYPTOTEK, COPENHAGEN;
PHOTOGRAPHED AT MUSEI CAPITOLINI, ROME
 ET T ALL,
FE
AT 126 OM MARBLE
,
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CUT F D W I
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ADORN FRIEZE
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INTRI S CENES,
155
WITH
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TRAJ ING
AMAZ N
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THAT TS TA LE:
ROME. I
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
Trajan’s Column, with a statue of St. Peter
installed by a Renaissance pope on top,
towers over the ruins of Trajan’s Forum,
which once included two libraries and
a grand civic space paid for by war spoils
from Dacia. The massive modern monu-
ment at right commemorates Victor
Emmanuel II, the first king of a united Italy.
I
By Andrew CurryPhotographs by Kenneth Garrett

n back-to-back wars fought between

A.D. 101 and 106, the emperor Trajan
mustered tens of thousands of Roman
troops, crossed the Danube River on
two of the longest bridges the ancient
world had ever seen, defeated a mighty
barbarian empire on its mountainous
home turf twice, then systematically
wiped it from the face of Europe.
NATIONAL HISTORY MUSEUM OF ROMANIA

In a visual narrative that
winds from the column’s
base to its top, Trajan
and his soldiers triumph
over the Dacians. In this
scene from a plaster
and marble-dust cast
made between 1939 and
1943, Trajan (at far left)
watches a battle, while
two Roman auxiliaries
present him with severed
enemy heads.
Trajan’s war on the Dacians, a civilization in
what is now Romania, was the defining event
of his -year rule. The loot he brought back
was staggering. One contemporary chronicler
boasted that the conquest yielded a half million
pounds of gold and a million pounds of silver,
not to mention a fertile new province.
The booty changed the landscape of Rome.
To commemorate the victory, Trajan commis-
sioned a forum that included a spacious plaza
surrounded by colonnades, two libraries, a grand
civic space known as the Basilica Ulpia, and pos-
sibly even a temple. The forum was “unique un-
der the heavens,” one early historian enthused,
“beggaring description and never again to be
imitated by mortal men.”
Towering over it was a stone column  feet
high, crowned with a bronze statue of the con-
queror. Spiraling around the column like a
modern-day comic strip is a narrative of the
Dacian campaigns: Thousands of intricately
carved Romans and Dacians march, build, fight,
sail, sneak, negotiate, plead, and perish in 
scenes. Completed in , the column has stood
for more than , years.
Today tourists crane their necks up at it as
guides explain its history. The eroded carvings
are hard to make out above the first few twists
of the story. All around are ruins—empty ped-
estals, cracked flagstones, broken pillars, and
shattered sculptures hint at the magnificence of
Trajan’s Forum, now fenced off and closed to
the public, a testament to past imperial glory.
The column is one of the most distinctive
monumental sculptures to have survived the fall
of Rome. For centuries classicists have treated
the carvings as a visual history of the wars, with
Trajan as the hero and Decebalus, the Dacian
king, as his worthy opponent. Archaeologists
have scrutinized the scenes to learn about the
uniforms, weapons, equipment, and tactics the
Roman Army used.
And because Trajan left Dacia in ruins, the
column and the remaining sculptures of de-
feated soldiers that once decorated the forum
are treasured today by Romanians as clues to
how their Dacian ancestors may have looked
and dressed.
The column was deeply influential, the inspi-
ration for later monuments in Rome and across
the empire. Over the centuries, as the city’s land-
marks crumbled, the column continued to fasci-
nate and awe. A Renaissance pope replaced the
statue of Trajan with one of St. Peter, to sanctify
the ancient artifact. Artists lowered themselves
in baskets from the top to study it in detail. Later
it was a favorite attraction for tourists: Goethe,
the German poet, climbed the  internal steps
in  to “enjoy that incomparable view.” Plaster
casts of the column were made starting in the
s, and they have preserved details that acid
rain and pollution have worn away.
Debate still simmers over the column’s con-
struction, meaning, and most of all, historical
Tr aja n’ s C olumn 
accuracy. It sometimes seems as if there are as there, presiding over a sacrifice to the gods. “It’s
many interpretations as there are carved figures, Trajan’s attempt to be not only a man of the
and there are , of those. army,” Coarelli says, “but also a man of culture.”
Of course Coarelli’s speculating. Whatever
Filippo Coarelli, a courtly Italian archaeologist form they took, Trajan’s memoirs are long gone.
and art historian in his late s, literally wrote In fact clues gleaned from the column and ex-
the book on the subject. In his sun-flooded liv- cavations at Sarmizegetusa, the Dacian capital,
ing room in Rome, he pulls his illustrated his- suggest that the carvings say more about Roman
tory of the column off a crowded bookshelf. preoccupations than about history.
“The column is an amazing work,” he says, Jon Coulston, an expert on Roman iconog-
leafing through black- raphy, arms, and equip-
and-white photos of the ment at the University of
carvings, pausing to ad- St. Andrews in Scotland,
mire dramatic scenes. studied the column up
“The Dacian women tor- D S I LVER close for months from
AN
turing Roman soldiers? GOLD RED FROM the scaffolding that sur-
N D E
The weeping Dacians
poisoning themselves to
P
C
L
IA
U
BUILT rounded it during restora-
tion work in the s and
avoid capture? It’s like a DA N’S F O R U M ’s. He wrote his doctoral
TV series.” T R A J A M N , dissertation on the land-
Or, Coarelli says, like H IS C OLU mark and has remained
AND N G T HE
Trajan’s memoirs. When G I obsessed—and pugna-
it was built, the column CHAN APE ciously contrarian—ever
NDS C
stood between the two
LA E. since. “People desper-
libraries, which per-
F ROM ately want to compare it
haps held the soldier-
emperor’s account of the O to news media and films,”
he says. “They’re over-
wars. The way Coarelli interpreting and always
sees it, the carving re- have. It’s all generic. You
sembles a scroll, the like- can’t believe a word of it.”
ly form of Trajan’s war diary. “The artist—and Coulston argues that no single mastermind
artists at this time didn’t have the freedom to do was behind the carvings. Slight differences in
what they wanted—must have acted according style and obvious mistakes, such as windows
to Trajan’s will,” he says. that disrupt scenes and scenes of inconsistent
Working under the supervision of a maestro, heights, convinced him that sculptors created
Coarelli says, sculptors followed a plan to create a the column on the fly, relying on what they’d
skyscraping version of Trajan’s scroll on  drums heard about the wars. “Instead of having what
of the finest Carrara marble. art historians love, which is a great master and
The emperor is the story’s hero. He appears creative mind,” he says, “the composition is be-
 times, depicted as a canny commander, ac- ing done by grunts at the stone face, not on a
complished statesman, and pious ruler. Here drawing board in the studio.”
he is giving a speech to the troops; there he is The artwork, in his view, was more “inspired
thoughtfully conferring with his advisers; over by” than “based on.” Take the column’s priori-
ties. There’s not much fighting in its depiction
Andrew Curry wrote about the Roman frontier of the two wars. Less than a quarter of the frieze
in the September  issue. Kenneth Garrett shows battles or sieges, and Trajan himself is
is a frequent contributor. never shown in combat.
 national geo graphic • april 
 A.D. 100
Roman Empire
Dacia
Trajan’s Dacian Wars
From their powerful realm north of the Danube River,
Black Sea
Rome the Dacians regularly raided the Roman Empire.
ROMANIA In A.D. 101 Trajan fortified the border and invaded with
Me d i
te
rr tens of thousands of troops. Two years of war led
ane
an Sea ASIA
SIA
0 mi 400 to a negotiated peace, which the Dacians promptly
0 km 400 broke. Trajan returned in 105 and crushed them.
PRESENT-DAY BOUNDARIES SHOWN AFRICA

Approximate army routes

C Roman, A.D. 101-102
A Dacian, A.D. 101-102
Roman, A.D. 105-106

R
P
0 mi 40

A
T
0 km 40
a
isz

H
T

IA
Apuseni

N
Gold
deposits

Pr
M
Potaissa

ut
O
(Turda) S ARM ATI A
M t s.

U N
D A C I A
Silver
reș deposits

Sir
Mu

T A

et
Apulum (Alba Iulia)
Battle of
Sarmizegetusa I N S
Sarmizegetusa 105
Berzobis
(Berzovia) C A R P A T H I A N M T S.
Aizis S Y L V A N I A N A L P S)
Roman
fortress
Battle of (T A N
R
Tapae
101
Castra Traiana
Dierna (Sîmbotin)
Lederata (Orșova)
Singidunum
(Belgrade) Viminacium
Drobeta TRAJAN’S BRIDGE
(Drobeta-Turnu
U P P E R MOES I A
Ol t

Severin)
Blac k
MAP: JEROME N. COOKSON, S ea
be
ALEXANDER STEGMAIER, AND
Durostorum
nu
MATTHEW TWOMBLY, NGM STAFF Battle of
ART: RADU OLTEAN (Silistra)
Da

SOURCES: IOANA A. OLTEAN,

Adamclisi
UNIVERSITY OF EXETER; 102
JON COULSTON, UNIVERSITY Oescus
OF ST. ANDREWS, SCOTLAND Novae LO WE R MOE SI A
PRESENT-DAY CITY NAMES
ARE IN PARENTHESES.
R O M A N E M P I R E

In the first major battle Trajan defeated

the Dacians (background) at Tapae.
A storm indicated to the Romans
(foreground) that the god Jupiter, with
his thunderbolts, was on their side.
 6.7 INCHES HIGH, FOURTH CENTURY B.C. 0.7-0.83 IN, FIRST CENTURY B.C.

A Wealth of Dacians fashioned precious metals into jewelry, coins, and art,
such as the gold-trimmed silver drinking vessel at left. These gold
“Barbarian” Art coins with Roman imagery and bracelets weighing up to two
pounds each were looted from the ruins of Sarmizegetusa, the
Dacian capital, and recovered in recent years.

Meanwhile legionaries—the highly trained interpretations controversial. Are the besieged

backbone of Rome’s war machine—occupy
themselves with building forts and bridges,
clearing roads, even harvesting crops. The
column portrays them as a force of order and
civilization, not destruction and conquest. You’d
think they were invincible too, since there’s not a
single dead Roman soldier on the column.
The column emphasizes Rome’s vast empire.
Trajan’s army includes African cavalrymen with
dreadlocks, Iberians slinging stones, Levantine
archers wearing pointy helmets, and bare-
chested Germans in pants, which would have
appeared exotic to toga-clad Romans. They’re all
fighting the Dacians, suggesting that anyone, no
matter how wild their hair or crazy their fashion
sense, could become a Roman. (Trajan was born
to Roman parents in what is now Spain.)
Some scenes remain ambiguous and their
 national geo graphic • april 
Dacians reaching for a cup to commit suicide
by drinking poison rather than face humiliation
at the hands of the conquering Romans? Or are
they just thirsty? Are the Dacian nobles gathered
around Trajan in scene after scene surrendering
or negotiating?
And what about the shocking depiction of
women torturing shirtless, bound captives with
flaming torches? Italians see them as captive Ro-
mans suffering at the hands of barbarian women.
Ernest Oberländer-Târnoveanu, the head of the
National History Museum of Romania, begs to
differ: “They’re definitely Dacian prisoners being
tortured by the angry widows of slain Roman
soldiers.” Like much about the column, what you
see tends to depend on what you think of the
Romans and the Dacians.
Among Roman politicians, “Dacian” was
synonymous with double-dealing. The historian
NATIONAL HISTORY MUSEUM OF ROMANIA
3.9-4.7 IN (DIAMETER), SECOND CENTURY B.C.–
FIRST CENTURY A.D.
Tacitus called them “a people which never can
be trusted.” They were known for squeezing the
equivalent of protection money out of the Ro-
man Empire while sending warriors to raid its
frontier towns. In  Trajan moved to punish
the troublesome Dacians. After nearly two years
of battle Decebalus, the Dacian king, negotiated
a treaty with Trajan, then promptly broke it.
Rome had been betrayed one time too many.
During the second invasion Trajan didn’t mess
around. Just look at the scenes that show the
looting of Sarmizegetusa or villages in flames.
“The campaigns were dreadful and violent,”
says Roberto Meneghini, the Italian archae-
ologist in charge of excavating Trajan’s Forum.
“Look at the Romans fighting with cutoff heads
in their mouths. War is war. The Roman legions
were known to be quite violent and fierce.”
Yet once the Dacians were vanquished, they
became a favorite theme for Roman sculptors.
Trajan’s Forum had dozens of statues of hand-
some, bearded Dacian warriors, a proud marble
army in the very heart of Rome.
The message seems intended for Romans, not
the surviving Dacians, most of whom had been
sold as slaves. “No Dacians were able to come
and see the column,” Meneghini says. “It was
for Roman citizens, to show the power of the
imperial machinery, capable of conquering such
a noble and fierce people.”
Trajan’s Column may be propaganda, but ar-
chaeologists say there’s an element of truth to it.
Excavations at Dacian sites, including Sarmi-
zegetusa, continue to reveal traces of a civilization
far more sophisticated than implied by “barbar-
ian,” the dismissive term the Romans used.
The Dacians had no written language, so what
we know about their culture is filtered through
Roman sources. Ample evidence suggests that
Tr aja n’ s C olumn 
This scene shows Roman soldiers loading
plunder onto pack animals after defeating
Decebalus, the Dacian king. Casts such
as this one preserve details on Trajan’s
Column that pollution has eroded.
NATIONAL HISTORY MUSEUM OF ROMANIA
they were a regional power for centuries, raiding
and exacting tribute from their neighbors. They
were skilled metalworkers, mining and smelting
iron and panning for gold to create magnificently
ornamented jewelry and weaponry.
Sarmizegetusa was their political and spiri-
tual capital. The ruined city lies high in the
mountains of central Romania. In Trajan’s day
the thousand-mile journey from Rome would
have taken a month at least. To get to the site
today, visitors have to negotiate a potholed dirt
road through the same forbidding valley that
Trajan faced. Back then the passes were guarded
by elaborate ridgetop fortifications; now only a
few peasant huts keep watch.
The towering beech trees that have grown
thick over Sarmizegetusa blot out the sun, cast-
ing a chill shade even on a warm day. A broad
flagstone road leads from the thick, half-buried
 national geo graphic • april 
walls of a fortress down to a wide, flat meadow.
This green expanse—a terrace carved out of
the mountainside—was the religious heart of
the Dacian world. Traces of buildings remain, a
mix of original stones and concrete reproduc-
tions, the legacy of an aborted communist-era
attempt to reconstruct the site. A triple ring of
stone pillars outlines a once impressive temple
that distantly echoes the round Dacian buildings
on Trajan’s Column. Next to it is a low, circular
stone altar carved with a sunburst pattern, the
sacred center of the Dacian universe.
For the past six years Gelu Florea, an ar-
chaeologist from Babeș-Bolyai University in
Cluj-Napoca, has spent summers excavating
the site. The exposed ruins, along with artifacts
recovered from looters, reveal a thriving hub of
manufacturing and religious ritual. Florea and

A partially recon-
structed temple stands
near a round altar
in the sacred precinct
of Sarmizegetusa,
which was demolished
after Rome’s victory.
Trajan colonized his
newest province with
Roman war veterans,
a legacy reflected in
the country’s modern
name, Romania.
his team have found evidence of Roman military
know-how and Greek architectural and artistic
influences. Using aerial imaging, archaeologists
have identified more than  man-made terrac-
es, which stretch for nearly three miles along the
valley. The entire settlement covered more than
 acres. “It’s amazing to see how cosmopolitan
they were up in the mountains,” says Florea. “It’s
the biggest, most representative, most complex
settlement in Dacia.”
There is no sign that the Dacians grew food
up here. There are no cultivated fields. Instead
archaeologists have found the remains of dense
clusters of workshops and houses, along with
furnaces for refining iron ore, tons of iron hunks
ready for working, and dozens of anvils. It seems
the city was a center of metal production, sup-
plying other Dacians with weapons and tools in
exchange for gold and grain.
The site is lush and quiet. Not far from the al-
tar rises a small spring that could have provided
water for religious rituals. Flecks of natural mica
make the dirt paths sparkle in the sun. The few
tourists speak in hushed voices.
It’s hard to imagine the ceremonies that took
place here—and the terrible end. As Florea
conjures the smoke and screams, looting and
slaughter, suicides and panic depicted on Trajan’s
Column, there’s a rumble of thunder. The sky is
suddenly menacing, the air sticky and humid.
The destruction of Dacia’s holiest temples and
altars followed Sarmizegetusa’s fall. “Everything
was dismantled by the Romans,” Florea says.
“There wasn’t a building remaining in the entire
fortress. It was a show of power—we have the
means, we have the power, we are the bosses.”
The rest of Dacia was devastated too. Near the
top of the column is a glimpse of the denoue-
ment: a village put to the torch, Dacians fleeing,
a province empty of all but cows and goats.
The two wars must have killed tens of thou-
sands. A contemporary claimed that Trajan
took , prisoners, bringing some ,
to Rome to fight in the gladiatorial games that
were staged for  days in celebration.
Dacia’s proud ruler spared himself the hu-
miliation of surrender. His end is carved on his
archrival’s column. Kneeling under an oak tree,
he raises a long, curved knife to his own neck.
“Decebalus, when his capital and all his ter-
ritory had been occupied and he was himself
in danger of being captured, committed sui-
cide; and his head was brought to Rome,” the
Roman historian Cassius Dio wrote a century
later. “In this way Dacia became subject to the
Romans.” j
MORE ONLINE ngm.com/more
ANIMATION
How They Built
the Column
INTERACTIVE
Spinning
the Frieze
Tr aja n’ s C olumn 
PROOF A PHOTOGRAPHER’S JOURNAL | proof.nationalgeographic.com

 national geo graphic • April 

Argentine
Identities
Story and Photographs by
MARCO VERNASCHI

A
rgentina is a promised
land blessed with
incredible beauty and
potential. I wanted to
create a project that
would emphasize its diversity, foster
conservation, and empower rural
communities to reach their produc-
tive and social potential. To support
this work, I created a foundation
called Biophilia (biophilia-founda-
tion .org), which means a love for life.
Since I moved here from Italy
ten years ago, I’ve seen Argentina’s
economy become more and more
focused on the large-scale cultivation
of genetically modified soybeans.
This is tragic, in terms of both cul-
ture and biodiversity. I felt the need
to do something about this by work-
ing to create an alternative approach
to a more sustainable future.
So on December 27, 2013, my wife,
Juli, and I began a five-month jour-
ney across the country. We worked
with rural farmers and small-scale
food producers to select, conceive,
and shape a specific set of projects
in four different Argentine regions:

Jujuy Province
The Suris, also known as Samilantes,
are a cultural group within the Quechua
community. This woman is Belén Cruz.
Her feathered costume represents the
nandu, or rhea, sacred bird of the Suris.
Misiones Province
The Jasy Pora Guarani community lives
in the Argentine Amazon near Brazil.
“I spent a beautiful time with this com-
munity,” says Vernaschi. Their Spanish
names reflect a colonial past. Here,
Hugo Martínez poses with his coati.
 PROOF A PHOTOGRAPHER’S JOURNAL | proof.nationalgeographic.com

the northwestern Altiplano, the

northeastern Mesopotamia, the
Gran Chaco, and Patagonia. During
that research period we produced
this series of photographs.
I was tired of pictures that
depicted farmers—which all of these
people are—as poor, as digging in
the dirt. Because I wanted to portray
them differently, I chose to focus on
their cultures. That’s why I asked the
Suri girl and the two Diablos to dress
in traditional ceremonial or carnival
apparel for their portraits.
Ultimately, Biophilia’s goal is
to help these indigenous groups
preserve their cultural heritage by
developing their own local econo-
mies through native products, like
potatoes, quinoa, and vicuña wool.
Eventually we hope to help them
develop brands, so that they can
commercialize their products and
participate in the fair trade market.
The trick is to connect each
group’s productive potential directly
to the enhancement of the natural
landscape. At the same time, it is
crucial that we take into serious ac-
count cultural identity, which is so
important to Argentina’s diversity.
Working with these communities
has been an enriching experience. If
we keep our hearts open and respect
every culture, there are lessons to
be learned every day. j

Jujuy Province
Dario González and his son, Carlos,
belong to a group called Los Diablos—
part of the Quechua community.
They believe the devil has the power
to both curse and protect.
Argentine Identities 
Neuquén Province
BOLIVIA
Al

These photographs were made in Patagonia’s Lake

tip

Nahuel Huapí area, home to an indigenous group BRAZIL

o c
lan

of people called the Mapuche. “There are not many

ha
o

n C

left,” says Vernaschi. “Colonialism robbed them JUJUY PARAGUAY

of their land a century ago. We want to help them MISIONES
Gra

reclaim it.” Many of the Mapuche are hunters,

including Salvador Quintriqueo (seated, top) and ia
am
his son, Ricardo. The Mapuche also raise angora ot
p
so

goats, which were brought to this region from Turkey.

Me

Wool is a major source of income in Patagonia, yet PACIFIC

OCEAN ARG EN TINA
the non-native goats have disturbed the environment, URUGUAY
says Vernaschi, so relying on them is ultimately
E

Buenos
CHIL

unsustainable. Mapuche homes, like that of Marita Aires

Andreau (standing, right, with friend Rosa Andreau),
have no electricity or running water. NEUQUÉN
Lake
Nahuel
I A

Huapí
N

ATLANTIC
G O

OCEAN
T A

0 mi 200
P A

0 km 200
NGM MAPS

 national geo graphic • April 

Jujuy Province
“This proud girl is Araceli del Rosario
Suárez,” Vernaschi says. “Most people
think of gauchos—probably Argentina’s
best known cultural group—as men, but
it is the women who uphold tradition.”
 In the Loupe
With Bill Bonner, National Geographic Archivist

Leaf
Peeper
On a Maui hillside, leaves of
the ‘ape‘ape plant dwarf a
man standing in their shade.
“The human figure gives an
accurate conception of the
size of this strange, beautiful
vegetation,” notes this photo’s
caption in the February 1924
Geographic. “He stands in
the same plane as the plants,
which were growing on the
slopes of the extinct volcano
Haleakala, in a small gulch
which had the hot, moist
fragrance of a greenhouse.”
The editors back then must
have really liked the image:
Two versions (with the same
man) appear in the issue,
titled “The Hawaiian Islands:
America’s Strongest Outpost
of Defense—The Volcanic
and Floral Wonderland of the
World.” —Margaret G. Zackowitz

PHOTO: GILBERT H. GROSVENOR, NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC CREATIVE

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